Smellection results (AKA: I gave up a night of sweet Bioshock love for THIS?)

So I got a call last week, the local elections board wanted somebody "tech-savvy" (I am slowly hating this term) to be on hand to post election results in the auditorium of the Board of Education central office. Seemed like a simple enough job, add the fact that I'm getting paid $125 to do it and I'll gladly put down Bioshock for a night to go do it.

So I get there today and meet the lady, she tells me that once the polls close, I'll get election results emailed to me in HTML format, all I have to do is make sure the results are displayed on the screen.......yep...that's all.

So I get in the auditorium, turn on the project, boot the machine connected to it. (since I helped design the system for the auditorium, I knew how everything worked)

I had brought two laptops with me, the personal one so I could work on Jericho Files #5 (you're welcome :) ) and then a company owned Asus eeePC to get acquainted with. ,
I connected to my email on the eeePC and then opened up a connection to the auditorium machine through the C string. So that whenever I got a new HTML file in the email, I could immediately save it to the desktop on the auditorium machine, and then just refresh the html file on the screen.

Simple, fast, and no fuss.

so I get there around 5:30 and start working on my story and the time passes. It gets to 7:00pm , the polls close. So I expect the ballots to come in soon...a family comes in asking about the results, I tell them they are not in yet....simple enough

Time passes

More Time Passes


*Press Enter to pass more time*


I didn't receive my first election result until 8:30. I posted it within 10 seconds.

9:30 rolls around...one more result...9:45...one more result.


Oh wait...I'm leaving something out.

Nobody ever came into the auditorium to check the results. At 9:50, a guy walks in and says "Yea...you might want to shut down. Apparently no one got the word out about the election results being displayed here....they're all down at the courthouse." (a 30 second drive) So I broke it all down at 10pm, packed up, and went home.

So I got (or I better get) paid to display election results to thin air......hmmmmmmm