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January 27, 2005
Home, home on the Range
... where the deer and the antelope play!
Back from Scottsdale AZ with a whole slew of new information. Unfortunately the conference organizers haven't really figured out that providing your attendees with wireless internet access is a good thing. More importantly, having the hotel's wireless just barely providing a signal in the conference room, only leads to a lot of frustrated attendees and a lack of attention spans to the conference itself. Oh yeah, if you're also providing breakfast, include meat in it somehow (i.e. bacon, sausage, or even lox). Just bagels and coffee doesn't cut it, really!
Oddly enough, my second trip to Arizona has proven to be about as disastrous as the first. The first time was a flight on America West from Philadelphia to Seattle, with a stop at the hub in Phoenix. Thanks to some bad weather, I was delayed in Philly long enough to miss my connecting flight and any flight happening that day to Seattle. America West was willing to put me up in a hotel, but they weren't about to tell me how to get there or even which of the hotels it was (there were a few by the same name). Eventually a group of stranded travelers commandeered a van that knew where he was going, charged it back to the airline and got about 3 hours of sleep before all of us tried to catch the next flight to Seattle.
This time wasn't much different. I arrived at the airport expecting to have a ticket to Phoenix. Despite my insistence, their computer was absolutely positive I was not on the flight (or any flight for that matter). They had the tickets for my two coworkers, but none for me. Odd. I was forced to buy a ticket there in hopes of catching the later flight down at least, with standby on the flight I was supposed to be on being an option. Stand-by didn't happen, and it was then that I realized my luggage was on it's way to Phoenix without me. Finally arriving in Phoenix later in the day, I had to put up with jokes of "you have purchase a plane ticket to fly idiot" and things like that (I knew those ribs were coming). What I hadn't expected was to find my luggage so easily. It was behind a sliding glass holding case, awaiting my pickup with the tracking number. The luggage handler and I walked right on down, moved to open the case, and SNAP the key broke in the lock. The next 40 minutes were spent trying to open the door.
At least Arizona had bright blue skies, beautiful sunsets AND sunrises. Warm weather was there the entire time, and it just felt relaxing. Now if only the conference room had windows, or more sunlight in it.
Posted by Dan at January 27, 2005 12:21 AM