Thursday, June 02, 2005

The worst business trip. The list.

1. Layover in Las Vegas, switched airlines, had to recheck in and go through security again. Slow, loud, old, tan people. Lots of them.
2. Packed plane. Talkative 8 ft man in center seat.
3. On-board movie: Robots.
4. Pittsburgh has the worst luggage system ever. About 10 flights go to 2 carousels. Waited with a couple hundred other people for two hours.
5. Luggage lost. Filed claim. “If you need to stop at WalMart and get yourself something to get you by until your luggage shows up we’ll reimburse you up to $50.” It was 10pm. We had to drive through rural West Virginia for an hour. No WalMart.
6. Meeting is in a somewhat rural area of West Virginia. I'll let you put an image to that description.
7. Highlight at the resort this summer: albino alligator.
8. Still no sign of my luggage.
9. But I have $50 to spend. The resort has a gift shop with resort wear.No.
10. Box of materials shipped for presentation is nowhere to be seen.
11. Ask front desk for where we could get color copies, like a Kinko’s. Blank stare. “Kinko’s? For color copies I think you’d have to go to the mall. It’s 20 miles.” Blank stare.
12. Rush to recreate materials, find local printer who can do the job. Pick up job for presentation. (Shipped box shows up.)
13. Still no sign of luggage.
14. Décor of said resort includes the glow worm, of whom I’m fascinated, and stare at every time I pass. I want to pet him. He makes me happy. glow worm garden
15. I try to not stare at the 100 or so of these. there are a lot of these on the walls
16. Front desk staff response when I ask if they can check the other locations on the property in case my luggage was dropped off there: “I’ll try”. Followed by blank stare.
17. I asked a local what’s something we should make sure to see while we’re here: “Greyhound races.”
18. We’re the only table in the restaurant tonight with several people of color. One of the first there, but the very last served. It took over 2 hours. And when we mentioned something, were signaled in a “calm it down” manner. I could be wrong, but it felt weird.
19. Luggage showed up tonight. We return to Portland tomorrow morning. (I guess this is a good thing really. I can finally change clothes.)
20. I can’t get John Denver out of my head.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

i would have stole their damn lawn gnomes.

Rozanne said...

How incredibly hellish. Bet you're really, really glad to be back in PDX.

That glow worm thing is surreal.

LeLo said...

So lawn gnomes, but as much as I tried not to look at it, I stared at the glow worm with every passing. And yes, Rozanne, it was surreal. Very. The plants that surrounded it I had to touch to see if they were real or plastic.