Back in the dark ages of the late 20th Century, my college had an automated phone system for registration into classes for each semester. Once you got through the jammed phone lines to the CAROLINE system (I went to the University of North Carolina… get it?), you punched in a code number for the class you wanted to enroll in. There was no way to know if the class still had seats, and if it wasn’t, well, the marginally Southern electronic voice would tell you, “Request… DENIED. This course is unavailable.”
Any Carolina alum from that era has their own horror stories and nightmares using the CAROLINE system. I always thought it’d make a great piece in the alumni magazine to track down the voice over artist who recorded the phrases. Honestly, they may even have done that already and I just haven’t found it in my rudimentary google search.
But all of this is a contextual backstory to the New York City Marathon lottery. The drawing happened yesterday to see which of us that applied got in.
I… did not.
According to a Runner’s World article, there were 10,510 slots available in the lottery… and some 117,709 people applied. This all makes for a roughly 9% success rate, something RW claims is slightly less than the acceptance rate at Duke University… though why anyone would want to go to that crappy school, I’ll never know.
And so while I couldn’t help but hear CAROLINE’s voice in my head as I read my rejection by the New York Road Runners for their (ahem… I know this is petty) little race, I was reminded of something else from way back when:
Once “online” with Caroline, you didn’t want to get disconnected due to inactivity longer than 15 seconds, so you either kept inputting the same class code to stall for time as CAROLINE “checked” the availability so you could scramble to find an alternate or your would already have a stack of “safety courses” to plug in for a temporary “add” to get your schedule kinda, sorta okay before making a usually pointless “in-person” pitch to the professor for an exception.
While my request has been denied by NYC, that only means it’s time to go back to the race catalog and pick something else that fits the schedule… because there are minimal requirements in life just as in college.