Grandma: The Witching Hour of XBox Live

If you find OGHC logged on between the hours of 1:00am and 7:00am EST and she's logged in playing World Championship Poker, chances are you've heard first hand the unique mixture of sleep apnea and "Holy Shit! A player!" In WCP, she sets up a table for Texas Hold Em' and patiently waits for a new victim to sign on to her game. In that time, the only thing one sees on screen are two Sims like people (The Dealer and Grandma manifest in digital form) sitting in silence around a large table with a clock in the background making its usual boring noise. Sometimes she'll wait up to 15 minutes before anyone will show up for a game. This extremely dull image coupled with the medication creates a series of "Poker- Sleep- Poker- Sleep" cycles that continue for hours, with median intervals of about 10 minutes.

The folks on the other end of the broadband don't know this, though. Grandma's crazy lady snoring voice sounds like weird static in the headphones. They log on, the table fills up, and all Grandma has to do is press the "Black" button on her controller to begin the game. Instead, she continues to explore dreamland (with her mouth wide open as though to slowly eat the microphone on her nifty Major Nelson headset TriXie sent over) and her gaming compadres begin to get, understandably, impatient.

"Hello??"
"Start the GAME!! COME ON!!!"
"Grandma, you alive?"
"Hey! HEY!!! WAKE UP!"
"What the FUCK? Did she go to the bathroom or something?"
"START THE GOD DAMN GAME!!!"

I roll the chair away from the computer and tap Grandma on the foot. "Do you want me to turn it off for you?"
"No! Why? Shit, I got players...."

Grandma doesn't always realize she had been asleep. When she is in that serene REM slumber, I'm pretty sure she DREAMS she's still playing the game. Her thumbs twitch a bit like she's been at a week long marathon without food or water but insists on carrying on to honor her country. Most of the time, however, she does hear the shouts of "HEY BITCH!" and responds with
"God dammit, wake yourself up Barbara, pay ATTENTION." I must have heard that phrase this morning at least sixty times.


So, Grandma offers her sincere apologies to anyone who experienced this phenomenon. I thought about putting images of the sleeping beauty up today to illustrate this point, but I'm pretty sure the flash would have woken her up, ruining her perfect impersonation of the corpse from Weekend at Bernie's. Grandma says in closing: "Cut me some slack, I'm an old lady!"


--More updates coming! We're making a couple new videos for you as well. Thanks everybody!"