What are you doing... Dave?

One of my duties as a network administrator is to set up the videoconferencing equipment for communications between Chicago and Urbana. In other offices, this would be as mundane as turning on a switch and a couple of TVs, laying microphones out on a table, and bidding everyone a good session as I walk out the door, humming to myself and counting the days to my retirement. At least, that's how it would work in the magical fantasy office that I've built out of the sad reality of our Rice Building office. For starters, the machine, a Polycom ViewStation FX, is at least a decade old, probably older, having sat in the Office of the President's conference room for that long before being shipped to us in a big cardboard box as part of a spring cleaning program that netted them two flat screens and us this machine plus two CRT televisions only slightly lighter than a Volkswagen Beetle. The TVs perch precariously atop steel carts, waiting, I believe, for the smallest tremble to hurl themselves face-first into the floor, where their weight will carry them, China Syndrome-like, to the center of the earth while the rest of us scramble to get the hell out of the way. For obvious reasons, we don't move them around very much.

The ViewStation, which is basically a mysterious streamlined base station with a disturbingly HAL-like eye poking out of the top and a few triangular microphones emerging from the station like Martian tentacles, also acts just like a Martian in that it's mostly dead or at best hibernating in anticipation of warmer, wetter climes. The on/off switch at the back works about 50% of the time, resulting in an amber light at the front of the unit. DO NOT BE FOOLED by its yellow glow! Anything short of solid green means the machine is cycling endlessly through its "clicking phase," a term I just pulled out of my ass to describe the faint humming emanating from inside of the plastic beast. Sometimes, in its cleverness, the amber/green diode won't light at all, then suddenly blink amber a couple of times, and shut off again. To solve this, I shut it off and turned it on again, repeatedly. Sure, occasionally, I would experiment with holding the only other button on the right side of the machine, but it usually amounts to nothing. I usually start off with a half an hour to do a setup that should take less than five minutes. As the failures mount, I start to hit that power button with increasing desperation. My boss usually shows up about five minutes before the scheduled meeting. She has less interest in videoconferencing than I do, and sometimes offers to hook up the speaker phone, but usually she makes fun of me first. It's hard to sit there, moronically hitting the power button over and over again, waiting desperately for the Polycom logo on the TV, and argue that I'm doing the best job I can.

For a long time I thought it just hated me, or I was as retarded as my sister thought I was growing up. But, no. Last month, I found a post on older Polycom equipment, and the silver soldering they used to connect components. Over time, the silver corrodes, leaving an insulating surface, and the machine stops working. They've since switched to gold, which is great, but they're expensive as hell, which is not. So, I continue to sit there, at first confidently, but slowly moving into begging and eventually all-out prayer to the machine god to stop hitting the snooze button and get to work. It's only a matter of time before I punch that thing in its goddamn HAL 9000 eye and set up the speaker phone. Which is also Polycom, but it works.