"A Fail Mix" - Random mishaps and complaints "from the Road".
Warning: whining ahead...
Recently, about halfway into a flight from Boston to San Jose, I realized I was not actually suffering from seasonal allergies but that I was in fact starting to come down with some kind of a a cold; e.g., slight fever, aches, runny nose and as I would discover during descent, clogged sinuses. Clearly, the woman next to me knew I was sick about 5 minutes into the flight, because she switched seats with her son (who was originally sitting next to me) and then promptly turned away and covered her face. Throughout the the remainer of the six hour flight, I discovered she was Chinese (based on her passport), she was traveling not only with her son but with her husband as well (I know because he kept coming up to talk to her) and that if I wanted to make her very uncomfortable all I had to do was take out a tissue and blow my nose. I wasn't actully trying to make her uneasy, but it was either that or continuously "sniffle".
About six hours later, both my seat buddy and I were well aware that the descent had begun because my ears wouldn't equalize and I was in absolute freaking agony. I was desperately trying everything I could think of to release the pressure including; simultaneously pulling my ears and blowing my nose, shaking my head from one side to the other and using my finger to create a plunger effect in my ear canal (BTW, don't do this.. It really freaking hurts). After about 10 minutes of flailing around I got that feeling that someone was looking at me and it was then that I noticed my buddy looking at me like I was some kind of biological WMD. God help me, but I think I kind of giggled when I saw the look on her face (actually it was more of a cackle that ended in a slight cough). When we finally made it to the gate, she pretty much ran off the plane in front of me.
Once I had collected my luggage, I tried to find the hotel shuttle but I ended up getting a taxi instead because I was really starting to feel lousy. As the taxi made it's way to the hotel, I thought I heard some weird noises but I chalked it up to my clogged ears and decided to just enjoy the ride with the knowledge that I would soon be able to relax in my room and get some rest. Once we were off the highway, we had to stop at a traffic light and when the light when green, the taxi's engine reved but it wouldn't actually accelerate. I think my driver Sarwan was expecting this because he immediately said "Van broke, calling to have someone pick you up and take you rest of the way", here's a picutre of him "phoning a friend".
Shortly after the picture was taken the police showed up and offered me a ride (since we were only half a mile from the hotel) but the officer said I'd need to "ride in the back".. This didn't appeal to me so I opted to walk the rest of the way.
Once I made it to the hotel reception area the guy at the Hotel front desk told me he had a "quiet room with an interesting view" and I discovered that:
it's was on the thirteenth floor,
it's was the room farthest away from the elevator,
interesting view is a relative term.
I finally made it to bed and was looking forward to a good day on Sunday. Unfortunately, Sunday's tutorial started bad and quickly got worse. The first presenter was German and while very knowledgeable, he would mispronounce the oddest words like "generate" (by making the "g" hard, like the "g" in "again") and there were many other examples. Keep in mind, I generally give anyone who makes the attempt to speak my language a huge amount of leeway because I don't speak theirs, but in this case when you combine his mispronunciation with my still clogged ears and the fact that the text on his slides was too small to read (even from the front row), it was miserable. Then the other attendees started to complain, which made him understandably nervous. His solution was to skip any slides that were hard to read and this fundamentally broke his presentation. Fortunately, just when things became unbearable, they announced lunch (which was actually excellent)
The presenter in the afternoon started strong but it quickly became obvious that he:
is an extremely capable software developer, and
he was almost completely unprepared.
The following picture is an example of something you should never do to an audience of technical people at 3:00 in the afternoon (e.g., line by line debug of a function that he couldn't get working).
I mean it's perfectly acceptable to show a working example, but watching someone debug their code is like watching a guy getting yelled at by his wife. You end up thinking he's an idiot and if you're smart you walk away. Which is what I did. I actually just wanted to go for a walk but given the luck I was having I was fearful of getting attacked by a wild animal. Oddly enough I did have a close call with a wild animal but I managed to start her down.
Throughout the the week I saw this cat in the same exact spot probably five times. Each time it gave me the same look. At one point I was thinking of bringing it some food to see if I could make a friend but the big "do not feed the wild animals" signs made me think better of it.
