Data Projector

(RECAB: After having gone to the bathroom and picked up the data projector and having forgotten the number of my room and having numerous flashbacks that I have to write about, I have finally manged to write myself into the room that is full of annoying sophomores.  I am after all my anxiety approximately 3 minutes late.)

I enter the room pushing the  damn data projection cart ahead of me.  It is not a grand entrance.  I say I am sorry I am late, but nobody says anything back.  Not:  Oh, that’s ok; or glad you are here; or go fuck yourself. Zip.

I manage to turn the cart and angle it towards the seats.  I say that I will have to push it back more towards the middle of the room.  I aim towards a gap between the row of seats and push in that direction.  But nobody moves.  Scoot over, I say, Come on. They move slowly and with apparent resentment at having to expend the energy to do so.  I unravel the power cord for the data projector and hand it towards a student seated by the projector, but he looks at it like he doesn’t know what a power cord is for.  I am saved by the student behind him who takes it and plug it into the wall socket.  My heart goes out to this helpful student. 

I then take out the cord that runs from the data projector to the laptop.  I screw it into the data projector…and it comes to me in a sudden and horrifying flash that, while I am that day going to show part of a documentary on the consumer society, I am not sure that I have any sound. 

I bought the documentary for 35 dollars off Amazon.  But when I got it I saw it wasn’t a regular DVD as I had thought ibut a CD rom.  Always anticipating technological difficulties, I had gone to my rooms  two weeks before class started and put one of the rom disks into the DVD player that is built into the wall and attached to a TV monitor hanging up there in the air. But the DVD player would not play the CD rom.  

Up to that point I had decided I would just bite the bullet and do without the data projector.  But since the CD rom would not play in the DVD player, I decided I had to use the data projector because I knew that the CD rom would play in my laptop, and if I could connect my laptop to a data projector, I could use that to project the CD rom onto the screen upfront.  The rooms that come with built in data projectors also have speakers in the ceiling.  Until that moment I had not stopped to consider that a data projector that was not built into the room might not have sound attached to it.

So far I have managed to enter the room, plug in the data projector power cord, attach the data cord to the data projector, and now I am paralyzed at the thought that, while I have a documentary to show the class, I may not have sound for them to hear the documentary.  I begin to sweat.  All around me is silence.  Frantically, I examine the data projector but can find nothing among all its little buttons indicating the presence of sound.  I feel like just giving up and going home.

But I decide to plunge on.  I will hook everything up, I will take roll, I will tell them that we are going to watch a documentary on the consumer society as part of the material for their first paper, and when no sound comes out of the data projector, I will act as if I am completely shocked and start cursing the people over in the AV department for not giving me the right projector.

I have a plan.  But no sound.