Ebonite man

Had the previously known "crappy" 25-26 on tap for last night. Since the new lanes have been installed, the shot has been much more consistent the first 3 weeks, so I wasn't expecting anything different. Our team was assigned lane 25, so this is where I started practice. Tried the usual 8 out to about 5, and the shot was solid in the pocket. Looked like status quo on this night as well. But wait, not so fast, as I tried the same shot on 26 only to chop the 6-9-10 off a full rack. WTF?!!! At the about the 40 ft mark, the ball looked like it was going to make a move towards the pocket only to skid out to the right after rolling another couple of feet. Did I release the ball wrong? Did I throw it too fast? Just as a sanity check, I had a guy on the other team try the same line as me. He throws a similar shot as me, so I wanted to see what would happen to him. His shot barely clipped the 3 pin! So I wasn't crazy, something was seriously wrong with the shot on 26. My theory was the lane machine probably malfunctioned putting down the normal 40 ft oil pattern, stopped for whatever reason, and when it was restarted, instead of buffing or cleaning the backends, it put down more oil. Needless to say, this was going to be a very challenging night and my expectations for high scores were very low. By the end of practice, I was playing a shot on 26 that I haven't played since my Junior League days, standing at 6 board and pointing the ball at 10. In a nutshell, jamming the ball in the pocket. Margin for error here was pretty much nil, so I had to make sure I didn't get it outside. Missing a bit inside seemed to be the way to go. This approach was pretty successfull and it was funny to see a few guys on the pair next to me give me a WTF kind of a line are you playing? Had to tell them the whole story what was going on and I almost was going to ask one guy to throw his ball out to 5 to see if it would come back since he is the biggest cranker on the league. If he couldn't get it to come back, no one would. The mental game was huge since I had to make sure I lined up correctly since I was playing 2 radically different shots on the 2 lanes. Even though the scoring pace was low (ended up with a 590), I was rather pleased I was able to handle playing these lines. Even though I lost some progress on average, this was a good test to see if I could handle a real tough condition. It's back to the right side of the house next week on 37-38, and hopefully I'll never see this kind of difference again.