Friday night adventures

Friday was IV’s quarterly service night. There are usually 3-5 different service projects for people to choose from. Some people went to serve ice cream at a nursing home, others made phone calls for a youth center, and others went around to the apartments on campus to clean their bathrooms, which has become a tradition every quarter in the past few years. Finally, people could make PBJ sandwiches for Open Door Mission, and write cards for old people’s birthdays.

After people started dividing up into projects, Becca came up to me and asked if we could get TV in this auditorium. It seems that a good friend of Val’s was going to be on the Jeopardy College Championship that night, and she wanted to watch. So, I got the TV going through the projector. We watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! on the big screen between 7 and 8 while we made sandwiches and cards. I handled running the TV and muting the commercials, since this is exactly what I do at home when we watch Jeopardy!. I know how long each commercial break runs, so I can time it on my watch and not have to worry about keeping an eye on the screen to run back and unmute it. Everyone cheered for Anna, but she didn’t end up winning, despite being the only one to get Final Jeopardy right.

Some people made the sandwiches, some people put them in individual zip-loc bags, and others ran to the store at various times to get supplies as needed. I found my niche as the bag packer. I took all the bagged sandwiches and packed them into grocery bags, counting them as I went. We ended up with 192 sandwiches, plus or minus a few, in approximately 10 bags.

After their service projects, everyone went to a meeting room in the dorms to eat pizza and play games. In quarters past, we’ve had the worship team do some songs there, in which case I handled the sound system. This time they didn’t plan anything big, so I wasn’t occupied setting up th sound. However, during the sandwich making they did decide to do some songs anyway, for which we didn’t have the lyrics to display at such short notice. So, they emailed me the words and I dumped them into an OpenOffice document. I didn’t really want to take the time to actually make slides (though I did do this on the fly in a previous quarter). I simply turned the background black, made the text big, put OpenOffice into full-screen mode, and removed any latent toolbars, to give a similar effect to the usual PowerPoint slides. I then scrolled around with the cursor as they sang the songs. It worked well enough, though not as polished as I’d prefer.

Stephen (who usually runs the PowerPoint) mentioned to me about the RIT Spring Festival. Somehow, perhaps by being an isolated commuter student, I’ve never heard anything official about this, neither this year nor in years past. (Somebody needs to do a better job of promoting it.) All I knew is that carnival rides appear in D lot every year with no explanation. Apparently it’s happening all Friday and Saturday, with rides, inflatables, and concerts at various times. The rides are all free, and Stephen said that was where he was headed afterward.

One I finished helping clean up the room, I figured I’d head over there and see what it was all about. There were 5 rides, a climbing wall, food, and miscellaneous carnival games. I’d never been on any rides like this before, and I wasn’t really intending to do so. I ran into Stephen and Richard (brothers) waiting in line for one of the rides. I watched them ride, and then saw Anti-Dan, Sarah White, and another girl I didn’t recognize. They invited me to join them to fill up the 4-person car on the Tornado. I supposed I’d come with them. Richard and Stephen got on as well, despite the former saying he wasn’t feeling quite as well after the previous spinning ride he’d been on. This was mainly a constant rotation, so it didn’t bother me much. While we were waiting for the ride to start, Dan and the other girl started talking about someone whose identity I didn’t catch. Sarah explained that the “he” in this conversation was a 3-foot-tall skeleton. I then realized that this was in fact Allison, whom I had seen on Facebook with her skeleton, and had subsequently emailed about to Carolita, a fellow skeleton-lover.

After that, we wandered into the line for the Octopus. Rich didn’t want to go on any more spinning rides, and on a related note, someone had recently thrown up on this ride. Stephen and I got on together. It proved to be rather cramped for my extra-long legs. Dave Ortiz and Dan got in the next car, followed by Sarah and Allison. The latter pair, they later said, had exactly the opposite problem, being short and therefore having too much room to slide around. The random rotations of this ride started to get to me, unlike the previous one, but I found that it was better if I relaxed and didn’t push with my legs against the car. Rich didn’t come, for precisely this reason.

We subsequently wandered around for a few minutes, and ended up talking near the ferris wheel. Stephen started asking me if I wanted to go on it, and edging toward the very short line to get on. I consented. He said it was scary because it was the most rickety of the rides. His point was reinforced while we were waiting. I saw one attendant looking up into the structure, and another talking to him. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I soon made out what was going on. The second guy pointed to a spot on the ground next to the contraption and held up a large metal nut, an inch or more in size. They proceeded to look around and try to find where it had come from. This wasn’t particularly encouraging, especially when they seemed to decide not to put us on one particular seat. But we got on anyway. Dave and Sarah got on the next seat. As we went around, Steve and I talked randomly about, among other things, the structural stability of the contraption, as it seemed to sway laterally slightly whenever we stopped at a certain point. It was just about 1 am at the time, which is when everything was to be shut down for the night. We stopped, and people were let off seat by seat. We thought that it was slightly strange that Dave had gotten on just after us and then got off first, leaving us to be the last to get off, but this wasn’t a big concern. We rotated to the point where we were just above and out of sight of the loading area. We continued chatting. Stephen jokingly suggested, “Everything’s shutting down — what if they leave us up here?” “We could probably climb down…” In a few minutes, we came down and were unloaded. The attendant said, “Sorry about that, guys.” “So you were planning on leaving us up there!” replied Stephen. We returned to the others, where Richard informed us, “I had to tell them you were still up there!” We laughed in amazement. He recounted:

Richard: “You know there’s people still up there?”
Attendant: “No, not until tomorrow.”
Richard: “No, I mean they’re up there right now! ”

“They had just put a lock on it to keep it from moving,” he finished. We hadn’t noticed anything was wrong; we were just sitting there admiring the view and jabbering away, waiting for our turn to get off. I also informed the gang of what I had seen before we got on, with the mysterious missing part. Maybe this isn’t the best ride to go on after all…