the YMCA delay: a story I told elsenet today
In the late 1990s I used to teach programming on a Christian summer camp for techie kids. The camp took over a boarding school for a week in the summer holidays, so the labs were in the classrooms.
My lab, the programming lab, was at the bottom of a grassy slope and had big windows facing it. The young people (YPs; official term for the campers) could pick from a bunch of activities, one of which was running a radio station.
The "studio" for that station was at the top of the grassy slope I mentioned, also with big windows, so it happened that people in each room could see into the other one.
A nice easy thing for the YPs who were running the station was a request show, and that's mostly what they did. People would ask over the camp network for whatever song they wanted. The station was streamed over the network into all the labs, about six of them, for the whole day
Now you prob know that if you stream something live online it gradually gets out of sync with the original. So as the day went on, the delay increased between the DJs saying something and the people in the labs hearing it.
One morning someone requested YMCA, and some of the kids in my lab thought it would be fun to do the dance, so they did. And it happened that someone requested it in the afternoon too. So we all did the dance again, and so did the radio station crew.
By this time of day there was a noticeable delay, a couple of seconds. It was faintly ludicrous to watch someone else doing the same dance but at a time offset. So not long after, someone, probably someone in my lab, requested YMCA again and got it. And this time it was even funnier, of course. You know when there's something that's only slightly amusing but it keeps happening to everyone in the room and becomes a running joke that's actually funny.
Well, that's the story behind this picture. Might be the fourth or fifth play of the song:
The best thing about this picture is the kid on the right who is diligently trying to get on with his work
People in the other labs had no idea what was going on, and they were messaging the studio saying "STOP PLAYING YMCA"
I was wearing sandals because the head person forbade me going barefoot a few days earlier because he thought it was unsafe. My ID badge is on the strap of my sandals because I always lost it if it was on a lanyard.
YMCA was appropriate because it was, at the time, a rather queer-friendly camp. Some kid or other would come out most years.
Thing is, kids who go to a programming camp are not generally the popular kids at school. So they got there expecting to be outcasts, and they find everyone else is like that too. Then they have a week of being comfortable with who they are, and it caused people to look inwards
Years later there was a power struggle and I was gutted when the homophobes won control of the camp. It destroyed something beautiful.. I mean, I had nothing to do with the camp by then, since I was in a different country, but it was personal, you know?
