I’m starting to think that my class finds me amusing. They laugh
whenever they see me get stressed out.

Today was supposed to be one of my easy days. Prof. Shepard was going
to do a demo, and all he needed was a Net connection. The audiovisual
people sent the confirmation last week. Great. Wonderful.

Except that the room didn’t actually come with a computer and Prof.
Shepard didn’t have a laptop. Ack!

I ran to Rosebrugh Building and borrowed a laptop from the
undergraduate office. I lugged the heavy Dell bag back to Bahen as
quickly as I could, and frantically set it up.

It booted into Windows 98. Had a bad feeling about that… Checked out
the TCP/IP settings and saw far too many entries. Not good. Felt
around the box. No Ethernet port! No Ethernet cable, either. Panic
panic panic.

Would’ve nearly hyperventilated in front of the class, ‘cept had a
hard time breathing because the A/V guy was a heavy smoker. Waaah.

Ran out again, grabbed a patch cable from my lab, and borrowed a
laptop from one of the students sitting near the back. Still didn’t
work! Panic panic panic. Rebooted. Checked ipconfig and realized I
missed a “0” in the IP address.

Fixed the error. Got Google to show up. Whee! Did whirl-around of joy.
Class laughed. Remembered I was in class. Tried to, err, grin in a
dignified manner. Went back to setting everything up.

Student in question was big fan of Mozilla Firefox and had even
bothered fixing Start Menu. Good for him. =) Brought up demo requested
by professor. Was trapped by seating arrangement in front part of
lecture theatre. Could not go back to my seat. Tried to inconspicuously
lean against wall.

Realized red blouse and bright orange skirt not conducive to
inconspicuous hiding. Tried not to fidget as would have been even more
distracting.

Saw professor switch back to browser and bring up Javascript-heavy
application. Just _knew_ there were going to be cross-platform
problems. Thanked lucky stars knew exact command name to call up
Internet Explorer. Saved the day again.

‘Course, still responsible for things not going as smoothly as
planned. Meep.