So, this Heidelberg basketball score thing. Someone roped me into helping out with a local league, you know, just a small community thing. They needed a way to show the scores, live, during the games. Sounded simple enough, right? Famous last words.
First off, the “equipment.” They handed me this ancient tablet, must’ve been a decade old. Thing took about five minutes to boot up, and the touchscreen was, let’s say, selectively responsive. My plan was to just use a simple score-keeping app or even a shared document. Easy. Or so I thought. I remember thinking, “This’ll be a quick job, in and out.” Boy, was I wrong.
The “Setup” Process
I got to the gym, and the Wi-Fi situation was a joke. It was one of those public networks that kicks you off every 15 minutes if you don’t sacrifice a small rodent to its digital gods. So, live updates to some fancy online scoreboard? Out the window. My phone’s hotspot became the reluctant hero, draining my battery like there was no tomorrow. I spent more time trying to get the connection stable than actually watching the game at first.
Then came the actual score input. During a fast-paced game, trying to tap the right buttons on that dodgy tablet screen while people are yelling scores at me… it was chaos. I swear, at one point, I was just adding points based on the loudest cheer. Not exactly precision engineering, that. You try telling a bunch of excited parents that their kid’s basket wasn’t counted because the screen didn’t register your tap.
- Tablet crashing mid-game? Check. More than once, actually.
- Me accidentally giving points to the wrong team? Probably. I corrected it, I think.
- Someone asking if I could also track fouls, timeouts, and individual player points on the same barely-functioning setup? Of course, they did. As if I was some kind of tech wizard with a magic wand.
We ended up with a system that was basically me, frantically trying to keep up, and then shouting the updated score to someone else who’d write it on a whiteboard. So much for “live digital display.” It was more like “delayed analog display, powered by frustration and my dwindling phone battery.” What a circus.
This whole charade reminded me so much of my early days in IT support. You get these requests, “Oh, it’s just a small thing, won’t take you long.” And then you find out the “small thing” is built on a foundation of rotting infrastructure, held together with digital duct tape and wishful thinking. It’s always the same story. People want the shiny end result, but nobody wants to invest in the basics to make it work reliably. It’s like asking someone to build a skyscraper on quicksand.
Why do I even bother with these things? I ask myself that a lot. I guess because sometimes, just sometimes, you see the kids having fun playing, and it makes the headache almost worth it. Almost. But then I remember trying to get that damn tablet to connect to the Wi-Fi again, sweat dripping down my face, and I think, “Never again.” Until the next time, probably. It’s a cycle, isn’t it? You just can’t help some folks, or some situations.
