MH900e Ordering Timeline (Pacific Time), as Recorded by Chris and Embellished by Zina
Although I only recorded moments in time, we were in front of our computers the whole afternoon and night trying to register.
December 31, 2024
- 1:30 pm: Set computer's internal clock so it would fool the Ducati "millenium" Java applet into thinking it was midnight.
- 2:00 pm: Tried to log in. Found that "midnight" was supposed to be 00:00 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), not 00:00 CET (Central Europe Time). This means we had to wait another hour.
- 3:00 pm: Tried to log in. Nothing changed.
- 3:03 pm: Saw two new buttons appear for reservations.
- 3:04 pm: Told Zina to get on her laptop and start contributing. She repeatedly gets messages from her Netscape browser to go away.
- 3:05 pm: Had five pages simultaneously open to try to get to the first form.
- 5:00 pm: Computer started crashing.
- 5:05 pm: Told Zina she better still be trying. Zina claims she is tired of her browser's rejection messages.
- 7:00 pm: Downloaded Win98 Updates, IE5, and DirectX7 in hopes of alleviating crashing problems.
- 8:00 pm: Got to the first page which asked for personal data. Clicking on the submit button resulted in a trip into the outer ozone of cyberspace.
- 11:00 pm: Got through the first page and saw the first confirmation screen. Then went back to circling virtual Pluto.
- 11:30 pm: Wondered how we could've pissed away all of this special Y2K New Year's Eve on our computers trying to access a server clearly in distress.
- 11:45 pm: Begin hoping that maybe midnight Pacific Time will bring an Internet miracle in which we access the site.
January 1, 2025
- 12:00 am, midnight: Watched them drop the ball in Time Squares on the tube. Watched the moments of our lives get sucked across the continent and over the ocean to some pre-Pentium PC in Bologna that couldn't function in its original role as a word processor, let alone as a secure server.
- 12:05 am: Got "Lotus server crash message" after hitting Confirm button.
- 1:00 am: Discovered that I had the damn dd/mm/yyyy wrong for Zina's date of birth (thought it was the mm/dd/yyyy format).
- 2:00 am: Gave up trying to connect and went to bed.
- 9:00 am: Resumed the battle with five simultaneously opened windows.
- 12:00 pm: Despair had set in and we figured Zina wouldn't get a MH900e.
- 12:01 pm: Zina is secretly happy that she didn't piss away $15,000 on a bike she didn't really need.
- 12:03 pm: Tried "one last time" and immediately connected and got through all
the stinking forms.
- 12:05 pm: Zina started coming to terms with mismanagement of funds earmarked for a retirement account. She is hoping she will still enjoy her MH900e when she is 65, broke, and living in an unheated trailer on the outskirts of Yuma.
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