Adventures with technology

I've always been a behind-the-scenes sort of person. The stuff that goes on that we don't even notice, that makes things run smoothly, usually intrigues me. So I'm not surprised that the two times this week that my reaction to ending up in the scorekeeper's box twice this week, fiddling with the scoreboard, had me thinking "hey that was kind of neat".

The first instance was at open hockey at an unfamiliar rink a few nights ago. Why would one need to run a scoreboard at open hockey, you might ask. If there are three goalies, and no clock anywhere to be found, running the clock on the scoreboard provides the only way to keep track of time and know when to change fairly. Of course, it took a bit for us to figure that out. As warmups were wrapping up that night and I was hanging out by the boards watching the other two goalies take shots, one of the goalies gave me the "10 minutes" signal. I nodded, looked around.... then skated over to him.

Me: This might sound dumb, but where's the clock?

Him (pointing to a lit display on the other side of the rink): Right over there.

Me: (silence)

Him: That's an exit sign isn't it.

Me: Yeah...

It wasn't until about 5 minutes into play that he skated up to the bench and asked me if I knew how to run the scoreboard, having come up with the brilliant idea that we could use that clock to keep track of our shifts. I had no clue, but another guy on the bench said he'd used to work it and would go set it for us. Unfortunately, he didn't set it to just run straight time, he set it up for a 20-minute period. That was all well and good but had the unfortunate effect of setting off the "pavlov's dog" mechanism in all the skaters' brains when the horn went off 20 minutes later. Even though we'd only played for about 25 minutes, play came to a screeching halt.

Dopey Defenseman: Whoah. Is that it? We're done?

Me (from the net): Keep playing, we just set it to keep track of time.

DD: Ooohhhh....

Usually, the scoreboard dude would go over and reset the clock every 20 minutes when the horn sounded. However if he was on the ice at the time, whichever goalie wasn't playing would go into the box and try to figure it out. Goalies being quite a smart breed, I had confidence that it wouldn't take much. How hard could it be? Still it made for an amusing picture, seeing a goalie in the scorer's box, standing there staring at the board, poking at random buttons and looking up at the clock.