This was something funny that happened last friday night, and definitely fits the bill here. My uncle offered to buy me a joystick for FSX and SSM2007. So I told him about the Saitek X52. He said no problem. To help with decreasing the cost, I went to eBay to try and win an auction. 2 auctions went by too expensive, until I tried searching for different variants of the name. So I found this seller who mistyped Saitek X52 and wrote Saitek X53, but he got the "ps28" right, which I think is the product number... Still, I decided to nail a bid at the last 5 seconds, even if no one had bid on it.
I set my laptop on the kitchen table (where I have the best 3G signal, I wont have hi-speed for another week), and set a $75 bid, but I left the cursor on the "Confirm Bid" button. 5 minutes, 5 seconds before the auction ended, I set the microwave on a 5-minute timer countdown. My brother joined me later on. You can imagine what happened.
"T-50 seconds and counting... shuttle Saitek now on internal power..."
"T-31... GLS is Go for Auto Sequence Start. The cursor now has control of the countdown." ...and I set my hand on the mouse button. And my bro was grinning.
"25..." "...15..." ...and my bro does the loud whistling pretty much like the sound suppression system does when blasting all 350,000 gallons of water into the SRB/SSMEs trenches.
"T minus 10..." "GLS is go for main engine start" "..7...6..." My brother does the whooshing and burning rocket sound... "...and we have main engine start....3.....2.....1...." The microwave beeps, and I press the button, auction confirmed, and a 5 second refresh later told me that this launch wasn't scrubbed. I won the auction at $63.
"....aaannnd LIFTOFF OF SPACE SHUTTLE SAITEK! Delivering new freedom of control to all aircraft and spacecraft piloted from this computer!"
....random. I guess depositing the money at the bank and paying via Paypal was the OMS-2 burn to put this baby into a stable orbit since not paying for it would have me flagged as a non-buying bidder (premature reentry!).
Lol.... Cupola.
