Harvey Lackawanna
Hear (Voice of Ione)
Then there’s Norman’s MCI experience. It goes like this:
One of his projects during the summer of 1997 was the task of porting
his Music: Imagination &
Technique software from its DOS version into Windows 95. Most of the
sound functions in
Windows were easy to implement, but there were some obscurities in
handling some of the more
advanced digital audio calls. These were all associated with what Microsoft
labels “Media
Control Interface” - MCI, for short. For some strange reason, there
was little readily accessible
information about the advanced MCI functions. So he devoted a considerable
amount of time to
scouring the Internet and bookstores for any titbit of information
that could shed light on using the MCI.
Sometime toward the middle of July, he went to his local Barnes &
Noble in a last-ditch effort to
find something, even though he’d been there several times earlier.
He was in the store about an
hour, and came across a couple books with some possibly useful information.
But he was late for something else and had to leave.
When he got out to his van to unlock the passenger side door (the driver’s
side door had a broken
lock - he couldn’t unlock it with the key), there, on the parking lot
pavement, staring blatantly up
at him, was something that looked like a little advertisement sign,
about 6" x 12", with the large
block-print letters in glowing reflector orange: “MCI”. He now has
this object in his possession.
It is a magnetized rubber panel that must have been on a truck or van,
but wherever and
whenever it came from, its appearance at that time, given his preoccupation
with MCI,
was nothing short of absurdly miraculous.