Today I decided to pop into the Maplin next to Oxford Circus on my commute home to pick up some InfraRed-LEDs to replace the ones I fried in the Optos the other day. My plan was flawless.. I can make a teeny diversion from my regular daily insane northern line commute from Colindale to Waterloo and go via Oxford Circus and grab my LEDs.. I phoned them before hand to reserve them, so they were just sitting behind the counter waiting for me.. what could go wrong?! .. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
What you have to understand first is that my commute home is retardidly long. I leave work in Colindale at 4.30pm and I get to Woking by about 6.30pm.<\/p>\n
How it all went wrong:<\/p>\n
At work we have a full size four player foosball table. My friend Arash and I are the office champions (well, usually!). So it’s about 4.15pm and Arash and I are getting our arses severly kicked, it’s not looking good. I’m glancing at the clock because I don’t want to get caught in too much rush hour human traffic. We loose quite disasteriously.. but we’ve still got time for another game before I have to leave.. so we swap sides and now we’re on fire! My wrists are solid adrenalin. I have the lightening reflexes of superman on speed, we rock. At 4.25 the ball slams into the back of the net and we are victorious! .. but now we have to play the third game in the best of three \ud83d\ude09 .. and I’ve got to go in five minutes.. only this time I totally suck! But the other guys are sucking too and the game goes on foreverrrrr! But then we starting pulling into the lead again.. then we’re loosing.. then we’re even.. then the other guys get to 9 points.. then we get to 9 points! So as you have to win by 2 clear points we reset to 0. We battle for the lead, gaining and loosing the advantage point until finally we loose! Bah! ..and now it’s 5pm! So I head out.<\/p>\n
The tube is relativly empty at Colindale, but as soon as we get close to central london it starts packing out, but it’s ok because I’m getting off at Oxford Circus. I stroll into Maplin and my IR-LEDs are waiting for me in a little bag with my name, whole transaction 1 minute tops and I’m out and back on the tube.. only now it’s SWARMING with commuters. A train pulls in and about 23 billion people get off and another 30 billion get on and I can’t get anywhere near the door, then I’m right there at the door and it starts beeping as it shuts. I dive forward and stick my foot in the door! Ah-ha! Clever huh!? .. Nope! I’m totally stuck! The door doesn’t open! I pull my foot back and my shoes comes off!! The trains going to run off with my shoe and leave me hopping on the platform!! ARRRRGGG! Then a crazy chick inside the train runs towards the door and kicks my shoe out! Hurrar! As she does it the doors open and shut really quickly, but I dive in, grabbing my shoe Indianna Jones style; I’ve made it! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
We arrive at Waterloo. I can tell I’m REALLY behind schedule because I’m having trouble seeing more than 3 foot ahead of me from all the people on the station. I glance up and see Platform 11 has a train to Woking. Now I swear that it had Woking on the top.. but after we were away it turns out I got on the stopper rather than the nice fast direct train. So I get in and all the seats are taken, so I sit on the floor by the door. There are 3 other people in the doorway bit and the train has 2 minutes to leave… 3 more people enter….. 5 more.. and more.. and more.. and more.. Now there are about 17 people standing in a space just slightly larger than a 3 seater sofa .. and I’m sitting cross legged on the floor. The doors shut and the train pulls away. Now what I want to know is why does the driver only announce that the train is the rubbish slow stopper once he’s locked the doors and you can’t escape?! Arrrgg!! I’m trapped in a tiny space with 17 people above me for like an hour! It usually only takes 23 minutes.<\/p>\n
I finally get home.. my pinball whispers to me that it wants it’s optos, so I head to the garage and open it up. I remove the fried IR-LEDs and solder in the new ones from Maplin, then fire it up. THEY DON’T WORK!! I squeezed myself into a human sweat sandwich for NOTHING! Boo hiss Maplin! .. The strange thing is, it didn’t fry them.. I tested them with my multimeter and they’re still fine.. They just don’t have enough juice to light up the detector. So I’ve filled in an order for them back at Pinball Heaven and I’ve order the new CPU chip too.. no idea what it does, but it seems a shame to pay a fiver for delivery and only a quid for the LEDs! Also since I’m feeling sorry for myself I ordered a new left flipper button because the current one has a little raised scratch in it and I can feel it when I’m playing. .. I could probably smooth it out with a little heat and a flat screwdriver, but I’m feeling poop so I’m ordering toys \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I decided to pop into the Maplin next to Oxford Circus on my commute home to pick up some InfraRed-LEDs to replace the ones I fried in the Optos the other day. My plan was flawless.. I can make a teeny diversion from my regular daily insane northern line commute from Colindale to Waterloo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pinball"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sonicpenguins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sonicpenguins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sonicpenguins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sonicpenguins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sonicpenguins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sonicpenguins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sonicpenguins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sonicpenguins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sonicpenguins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}