It Pays to Glaze

(This is the third of four stories from YAB Editor-in-Chief Chris Condon’s “Island in the YAB” vacation. Enjoy.)

Leave it to Chris to make the recreational…well, trainwrecreational.

There’s a lot to do in the week leading up to a wedding. There are tuxedos to pick up, bags to pack, dinners to rehearse, tuxedos to alter, shopping to do, work to tie up, tuxedos to try on, bills to pay, passports to find, tuxedos to dry clean after playing roller hockey in them, toasts to prepare, churches to go to.Just kidding, honey. I knew right where my passport was.

This leaves that final round of pesky schoolwork somewhere on the list of priorities between “organizing my new sock drawer” and “actually writing down a list of priorities.” And while it would have been nice to focus all my energy on planning the wedding, it appeared that I had a few more deadlines to meet in that whole “pursuing one’s further education” initiative prior to the vows.

Hi, I’m Chris Condon, a Slacker Extraordinaire. Nice to meet you.

One by one, though, I was finding clever ways to slide in an hour or two to knock papers/assignments/tests off the academic docket (acadocket) Coming back to work to pound out a page or two on the legitimacy of a firm’s business model became commonplace. Resorting to returning to Random Run for some much-needed internet connectivity to e-mail group members. Or, my personal favorite – making up presentations as I go along, and watching in amazement as my professor and classmates are oddly entranced with my rapid fire deliveries.

One paper in particular, however, continued to elude my grasp as the big day drew near. It was nothing special – just a 10 page case analysis on Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. Apparently, in a prior state of sanity, I told my professor I would turn said paper in on time – the Wednesday after the wedding for class. Gulp.

This one just didn’t want to be written. I tried to convince myself that doughnuts should be incentive enough to write a paper, but unable to find an actual doughnut button on the keyboard (whereby a pastry is jettisoned from the DVD drive), I had a half-written paper by the time I boarded the plane for St. Lucia.

Rather than kicking back to the bland romantic comedy Fever Pitch, I typed furiously, convinced I would complete my work before the plane touched down. This, my friends, was the easy part.

Getting a computer file from a laptop to the United States from St. Lucia via the Internet? This, my friends, is the hard part.

St. Lucia has Internet, don’t get me wrong. And from my limited usage of their system, I would go so far as to say it was even “high-speed.” But when Internet time costs 3 minutes for a dollar, there’s no time to take it out for a test drive.

The Sandals Regency Business Center has two computers, and in the vein of Harford, we’ll name them Diablo and I Hate You. All I need to do is transfer the file on my flash drive to one of the aforementioned computers, open up an email, and send Krispy Kreme on his chocolate frosted way.

Oh, so computers in the Sandals Regency Business Center don’t understand USB Flash Drive technology? Ah, no problem, the concierge desk prescribes I put the paper on a CD and transfer it to the desktop that way. Great! 5 dollars and a trip to the Photo Desk later, my beloved writings have been transferred and are ready for deployment. Let’s try our inept duo once more.

Diablo has access to the Internet, but a CD drive that can’t read CDs.
I Hate You has a CD drive that is functional, but has a down Internet connection.

Diablo! I Hate You!

After much soul searching and hand wringing, I was finally able to send my paper from the cushy desk of the resort’s IT Manager. Phew.

And that, children, is how the mighty Chris vanquished technology of yore into the dark night…all in the name of doughnuts.

(Never thought those words would combine for a sentence.)