The long awaited day – January 7th – has nearly arrived. With Christmas safely over, Santa’s elves worked round the clock to finish building the WWE’s new High Definition TV trucks, code named ‘Peanut Butter‘ and ‘Jelly,’ installing several jillion dollars worth of high tech gear, including countless mysterious black boxes with curious names like ‘X-75’ and ‘Model 41′, and seven hundred thousand miles of wire connecting it all together. The rest of the elves’ days were occupied with the simple job of making sure all that freshly unwrapped and installed Hi Def equipment worked as advertised. Green and blue lights on the Model 41 and X-75 devices winked and blinked to life for the first time. The day before ‘Peanut Butter‘ and ‘Jelly‘ were scheduled to make their first ever drive to a venue, they were officially christened with the much less creative names ‘Black‘ and ‘Red.’

Yuck.

Boring names aside, truck building and testing continued right up to the last second, then – almost as if waking up from a bad dream – time was up and zero hour dawned. Hammers, monkey wrenches and crow bars were returned to toolboxes, plasma torches were left to cool down, people that hadn’t seen the sun, their families or a shower in a month were released from their shackles; four thousand empty cans of Mountain Dew and Red Bull were swept up and carted off to the recycling center; and late Friday night, with surprisingly little ceremony, twenty bazillion dollars worth of WWE High Definition TV trucks rolled out of the super-secret truck building laboratories for the first time ever.

In what the more negative people on the crew certainly took as a bad omen, those insanely expensive trucks rolled directly into a four hour traffic jam, making them very late to arrive for the first ever ‘official’ WWE High Definition Monday night RAW live broadcast. Or, as the optimists would say, the trucks made a fashionably late entrance. Is the glass half-full, half-empty, or is it just cracked?! Either way, the dawning of High Definition was upon us!

Fortunately, our schedule allows two full days to set up these new trucks for Monday night’s show. Unfortunately, we really need about a week. An entirely new system needs to be learned, audio consoles, fiber optic head ends, routers, intercoms, Hi Def cameras, and a whole plethora of bleeding edge gear need to be programmed, figured out and made to do what we think it should do. The best consultants in the world have been flown in, tricked into teaching us WWE truck monkeys how to make our show happen in this brave new world of HD.

Is there enough time to make it work? Uhh… sure! Can brave consultants teach a bunch of old dogs some new tricks? Who knows? Is that smell in the air excitement, fear, an equipment fire, or just recycled bean burritos? It’s anyone’s guess! Will there be enough Whiksy left to get us through Tuesday’s show in Wilkes-Barre? Doubtful! Will all of this new gear really work? Only time will tell, and as of this writing, there are exactly thirty-five hours remaining until we go on air with… something! As always, the show must go on, in some form. In other words, foam the runway, this plane is landing, one way or another!

Depending on how successful tomorrow’s show is, maybe the names ‘Black and Blue‘ will prove more appropriate.

Author: frenchy