Working for a Living

Tuesday, September 12th

Tuesday was the second day that I really felt like I was working to pay for the privilege to be sent to Spain by Novell. My only official shift ran from 10 AM until 2:30 PM. But I voluntarily agreed to sit in on a meeting that ran from 4 PM to 6:30 PM. with some of the GroupWise partners who had scheduled a "summit" in regards to the GroupWise API's. It was actually kind of cool to meet with a large number of our partners in person and hear their opinions on the state of the GroupWise API's.

Shortly after the API meeting I was scheduled, along with everyone else, to work "Meet The Experts" from 7:30 PM to 11 PM. Again, it was interesting to meet and talk with customers but it really made for a long day. I was really pleased with the amount of interest in the GroupWise Outlook Connector. I was also pleased with the number of Exchange to GroupWise migrations that heard of (some past and some future) during Brainshare.

The highlight of the night was meeting a female GroupWise administrator from the Netherlands. She was kind of cute and she seemed to be flirting with me a little. Even though I answered all of her real questions in the first couple of minutes she ccontinued talking to me for nearly half an hour with trivial questions and superficial chit chat. I really felt like she was fishing to be asked out.

Unfortunately I didn't have the balls to follow through. If I was wrong (which I had recently been with the female park ranger at the Redwood National Park campground) then it would actually be really unprofessional of me to be hitting on a customer. On the other hand, if I was right, I probably woudn't have slept alone that night. Oh well.

By the time that we finally left around 11:30 PM I was pretty exhaused from standing all day and tired from only gettting 4 hours of sleep the previous night. Surprisingly I still really felt like going out and doing something. Drinking was out because my stomach was still recovering from the previous night's debacle. Unfortunately it sounded like most everyone else was kind of tired and just wanted to turn in for the night. There isn't much to do in Barcelona at midnight if you aren't drinking.

I walked home from the convention center. About half-way home it occurrred to me that I should go out and ride my bike for a little while. I had doubly motivated. First, I had been working all day and hadn't really gotten any good exercise. Second, I hadn't had a chance to ride the bike since it was repaired earlier in the afternoon.

I was also pissed about the note that the rental company left in my room. They left a note saying that they were concerned that the reason that I kept getting flat tires was because I was "over the specifications" of their mountain bikes. I was pretty offended. They were basically saying that I was too fat to ride their mountain bikes.

So, I was additionally motivated to ride the bike to prove the bike rental company wrong: I was not getting flat tires because I was too fat to ride a mountain bike. I was a little cautious for the first couple of miles but after that I quit worrying about the tire blowing out. I really think that I just got unlucky three times in a row. It could have happenned to anyone.

The ride was successful. I didn't get a flat tire in nearly 15 miles of riding. I rode out the beach for the first several miles until I got back to the statue of columbus. From there I decided to take a different route and return home through the city. It was 2 AM by the time that I got back to the hotel.