Mr. Murphy works on Sundays

Mr. Murphy and his dang-blasted law were working busily yesterday. It was certainly one of those mornings.

It started off innocently enough, just another Sunday morning, with its usual hassles. It didn’t really start to go downhill until about 10:15, when I was trying to fit the pastor with the new earpiece microphone. It’s supposed to bend to fit to your ear. It bent just a little, and then… *snap*. It just broke in two. We’re talking a $400 microphone here. It’s still under warranty, so I’m hopefully they’ll replace it. It shouldn’t just snap like that. We switched the pastor to the regular lapel mic and that went OK.

So then I ran back into the sanctuary to hook up the laptop to the new projector (which we used for the first time last week) to show some announcements before the service started and then to run the slides for our song lyrics. First, I couldn’t turn on the projector until Sunday School (which meets in the sanctuary during the summer) was over… and it ran late, didn’t end until 10:28 for a 10:30 service. So finally I turn it on, only to read with with horrified eyes, “NO VIDEO SIGNAL DETECTED”. Arrrgh. No time to debug, gotta switch to plan B. Fortunately the old overhead projector was still sitting in the back of the room, under the coat rack.

Sam was kind enough to grab it for me so I could go start my piano prelude. He also pulled the overheads for the songs we were singing. Becky agreed to run the overheads for me. We got the service started about 5 minutes late. When we finally got to the singing portion, the second song was supposed to be Open the Eyes of my Heart. I’m in my usual tuned-out, eyes-closed mode. After singing the first couple lines, I look up at the screen to see it… blank. I look over at Becky and see a helpless look on her face - Sam had mistakenly pulled the overhead for Open Our Eyes instead of Open the eyes…. I kinda stopped mid-song and apologized. But folks know the song, and were singing pretty well, so we just continued sans lyrics. I think it ended up working OK but I was so dang frustrated it didn’t really matter to me at that point.

I pulled out the ladder afterwards to check out the projector and I still don’t know why it’s not working. I tried a different laptop, but still no signal detected. Today I’m going to try a different monitor cable and see if that’s the issue. There’s not that many links in the chain, so I should be able to localize it…

…oh, and next time, Mr. Murphy? Take Sunday off.