My coworkers and I all gathered this afternoon to watch President Barack Obama’s first inaugural address, as people did in many offices across the country.  I took food orders and brought back lunch for those who didn’t have their own, and setup a laptop to stream the inauguration live onto the projection screen in one of our conference rooms.  About 20 people gathered to watch reverently.

And then the feed cut out.

Evidently the tubes of the Internet were clogged this afternoon with people trying to watch the events of inauguration day.  As the seconds to Obama’s oath ticked down, a room full of very intelligent people brainstormed ways we could get coverage.

“Try the local stations directly,” one of my colleagues suggested.  I brought up Boston’s NBC affiliate, WHDH.  They just offered MSNBC’s national feed, which was unavailable.

“Try YouTube!” another suggested.  We couldn’t find any evidence of a live feed on YouTube.

“Try NPR!  We’ll at least be able to hear it!” suggested a third.  I opened WBUR only to get a “server unavailable due to high activity” error.  We couldn’t even listen to it!

By this time President Obama had certainly taken the oath and had begun to address the nation.  Discouraged, and running out of ideas, I turned sullenly when a colleague asked, “What’s that box over there?”

We have a video capture station in the room to record demonstrations, surrounded by a small pile of video equipment.  (There’s also what I suspect is a genuine VT220 terminal, though I’d have to look more closely.)

“Part of the Echo360 setup probably, right?”

“It says ‘HDTV’ on it.”

If you haven’t been in a room with computer engineers when there’s equipment to setup, know that you should stand back in a hurry.  Wires were unplugged and rerouted.  Buttons were pressed.  Menus were seen and contemplated.  And then a live television picture appeared on the screen before our eyes, without all that fancy buffering nonsense.

So, in the end, it took a highly skilled information technology workforce of 20 competent adults fully five minutes to realize we could turn on the television.

We will never speak of this again.