As posted in another thread, this past week I won another arcade game off of ebay - a stand up, 2 in 1 Nintendo cabinet, with vs. Super Mario Brothers on one side and vs. Excitebike on the other (Link To Auction).

The plan was simple. Leave my house at 9am. Pick up a friend and my dad's trailer, be on the road by 10am. That part in reality should only take 30 minutes, but I left some extra time in there in case anything happened. From there it's a 2 hour trip to Ada, Oklahoma (population 15,000).

At 9am as I'm preparing to walk out the door I fire up my GPS software. At that point I remembered that I had formatted my laptop, and my software hasn't been reinstalled. I turned the house upside down looking for the CD but could not find it. I go to Delorme's website, but their site keeps locking up, so it takes me 5 tries to get their drivers. Once the drivers are installed I realize I have no map software installed either. I have MS Street and Maps but never installed it so I install that but it hangs up. From there I say screw it and just go to Mapquest. Problem is, their street (Cedar) is not listed in Mapquest. Or Yahoo Maps. Or Microsoft's Streets and Maps. Or any other program I can find. So, I write down the people's phone number and head out blindly, knowing roughly where Ada is. It's 9:45am.

I pick up my friend, the trailer, get gas, breakfast, and cash from the money machine. It's 10:30am.

We get to Ada just after noon (we made great time on the interstate). Then I call to get directions. The reason their street did not show up is because they don't live in Ada; they live in Byng, Oklahoma. Population, 1,000. Their directions basically say go in one direction until we see the Cit-Go gas station, and turn there.

After following the directions, my friend and I end up so far out in the country that at the top of every hill we look in all directions looking for any sign of civilization but all we can see are cows and sheep. I mean, for miles, and not even a home or anything. Eventually we call them again and the guy says "yeah it might be a Conoco now, I'm not sure what it is." Of course, we passed a Conoco 15 miles earlier, so the guy says he'll meet us there.

So, the guy meets us there and takes us back to his house. We get there, and the game doesn't work.

Again.

The game doesn't work.

When they fire it up, both monitors are flashing on and off, not unlike an NES with the blinking problem. The Mario one is showing SMB between flashes, the Excitebike one is alternating between a blue screen and a red screen. Of course they say, "this has never happened before!" They seemed pretty honest and I believed them. Then the woman says that the game actually belongs to her mentally retarded brother who got the game in payment for some odd job he did, and had hoped to sell it for $4000 dollars. Earlier this morning, he was "working" on the game. Now it doesn't work, and he's nowhere to be found.

After messing around with the game for almost an hour, we all just agreed to part ways. The weird thing was, at one point we moved the game and it started working for about two seconds but we could never duplicate it. Sounds like something was loose but I have no idea what it was.

From there, my friend and I went to eat, and then drive back home. Total trip time, 7 hours.

And I came home empty handed.