[Seek] Friends Who Will Laugh With You

We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.

That was the theme of the past forty-eight hours or so. I'd tell you the whole story, but that would take pages upon pages. Instead I'll tell a short story and then make a list. I love lists!

1. I went to get a cardiac stress test. Drove past the building. Went around the block. Went into the wrong driveway. Went into the correct driveway. Parked, entered the building, did all the screenings, was brought to the room with the treadmill. All my information was confirmed in the computer. But then my account disappeared from the computer as soon as they tried to save it. They went back and pulled up my account. Confirmed info. Disappeared again. They restarted the computer. Checked another computer. And a third. And a fourth. Twenty minutes later, and I was moved to another room with a computer that actually cooperated with them. and proceeded with my stress test. Not that I wasn't already stressed by this point.

Then, I began putting our church's Pentecost worship video together and the following happened:

2. I crashed the photo editor when I apparently removed the background from and inserted one too many photos into this image:

to create this image:

3. Our church administrator called, as she was having technical difficulties with her computer. 

4. I then had technical difficulties with my computer trying to help her.

5. I agreed to put together a video so she had one less thing to worry about. It took me about ten minutes to put the video together. It then took between four and five hours and three failed attempts before the video was successfully processed and uploaded due to my computer shutting down randomly and being incredibly slow for no reason.

6. Pastor and I were trying to sort out which hymn went where and what we were doing with the seemingly extraneous hymn that we recorded. Following that conversation, which had left us perplexed, I then asked a separate question about what we were using for the gospel acclamation. We both swore we recorded something, but couldn't remember what it was. After referring to an email she sent the week prior, we figured out it was the extraneous hymn.

7. My Dad recorded my Mom reading one of the readings for worship. Twice. Neither of us could figure out why he was unable to email the videos or upload them to somewhere I could get to them. He did, however, add 23 seconds of the video to his Facebook story. We ended up meeting at church at 6:45PM so that I could record the video.

8. I discovered that the video of the reading of the psalm was grainy after contacting the person who filmed the video who sent it to the pastor instead of to me and having him send it to me. He then re-recorded that video.

9. The graphics I had made for one of the hymns had all four verses and only two were sung - the first and last - so I had to remake the image.

10. The person doing a video of the Lord's prayer in ASL also couldn't upload it or email it, and finally sent it to me on Facebook messenger. 
11. Our pastor had one last video to upload so I could complete worship, and then it wouldn't upload. 

12. While adding the last video in, the video editor decided to shift everything else slightly - the video a bit, the sound a bit more, the images even more. Every aspect of the 3 layers of video and 8 layers of audio was messed up. Thank God for "undo." 
13. The pouring of the water into the font video wasn't as long as the separately-recorded audio that went with the video. Trying a little editing magic, the video editing software wouldn't give me a preview of the video so I could see if the editing actually worked or made sense. 

14. Driving to and from the church for our last-minute recording session, my van started yelling at me to get one of the van's systems checked immediately. All the sudden, persistent, loud beeping was just what I needed. 

Through it all, I had friends who laughed with me at the ridiculousness of it all. 

At the cardiologist, I was thinking that of course this would happen to me. I seem to attract life malfunctions. Now I'm afraid that I'm rubbing off on those around me!