Day One

This is a quick, easy way for me to record my experiences traveling to Atlanta for a business trip with Theo, my coworker and friend. We flew out of San Diego on Sunday at with a departure time of 9am, so of course arrived at the airport at 7:30. We left a rainy San Diego, which was a perfect day for air travel in my mind. In fact, a rainy day is a perfect day for just about anything as far as I am concerned and whenever it actually does choose to rain in San Diego, it is a distinct reminder that I have chosen the wrong city to live in.

Of course, I had to show Theo that there really is such a thing as a "don." button. The don button is that special button that gets pushed every time I am near a possible difficult situation to ensure that I get to experience the situation to its fullest effect. At work, it means that I nearly always get the privilege of finding all the bugs in Siebel. In my home life, it means that if it is electronic and it is supposed to "just work" right out of the box, I can guarantee that it won't. Nothing catastrophic ever comes of the "don." button, just an extreme amount of annoyance. Our first taste of the button was no A/C on the plane. This meant that it very quickly got very warm in the back of the plane and did not start to cool down until after we were airborne. It also meant that the captain was "worried that it might affect cabin pressure".

We arrived in Atlanta right on time, just after 4pm est. We took the MARTA North to the Dunwoody neighborhood, disembarked and headed for the waiting area for our shuttle. Riding MARTA reminded me a LOT of riding the tube in London and made me miss mass transit even more. The shuttle arrived and shuttled us off to the hotel where we checked in and discovered that our arrangements were not, despite assurances to the contrary, taken care of in advance.

So the nice gentleman at the counter promptly informed us that he would be more than happy to take our $800 payments. This rendition of the "button" did not sit well with either of us, so after some negotiation, we were told that they would only take a $50 hold and that we just needed to get the company card faxed over first thing in the morning. Apparently $50 actually meant $400 in my case and the $800 total bill in Theo's case, just as a deposit mind you, and came with some extra goodies like triggering my fraud prevention when four hours later, the hotel attempted to take an additional $240, $400, $150, and $75 in a row. Thankfully, I am used to getting buttoned, so was carrying cash, otherwise, I would not have been able to pay for anything until after clearing my fraud protection.

Theo was having dinner with a friend, so I checked out the local highlights and settled on Chipotle for dinner, came back to the hotel and worked on my SQL homework while I was wolfing down the spicy goodness of a barbacoa burrito with two containers of hot sauce.