?!

I’ve been to Atlanta before, but this was just plain nuts. There are numerous reasons for the craziness, but all I can say is “Wow.”

So the trip started off just fine, although I was responsible for my own rental car. This may not seem very substantial to the casual reader, but this ultimately meant that I wasn’t going to have my compatriot with me for the entire trip. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but I’m going to chalk that up as the first screw that was loose on this trip. We worked together in the first office for a couple days, but then one of our Network Admins and I switched to the second office for the remainder of the week. The work itself wasn’t too hard, but it boiled down to the people that were the problem.

The first office was usurpted by our company more than ten years ago, but it almost seems like the people there haven’t yet got the message. It reminds me of the joke-like stories of prehistoric wars where people fighting at remote battlefronts would keep fighting years and years after the war actually ended. Well, while there isn’t really a war, I kinda got the impression that some of the people still think that they work for their own company intead. Since we hail from the “home office,” there are occasional moments of animosity where the cold shoulders are on full display. I can’t say that I can blame them for it, but it definitely doesn’t make my job any easier.

The second office has always been “ours,” but the culture that exists there is ENTIRELY different than the first. The people in that office are so fun and lively and funny that I felt bad for having to keep them in line. They were an absolute blast.

Then there were two additional travellers with us: the guy and the gal. The guy is from the Network Administrators group, and he was brought along to be an extra set of hands and to share the experience with other people from our IT department. The gal is actually the person that I report to directly. While it was nice to have more help, there were monents when it seemed like having more people was actually a chore. I could go on and say more, but I’ll stop there.

Since we were trying to work in two different offices at the same time, I had dinner with different people almost every night. One night, my compatriot and I drove around for about an hour only to return to the area near the office/hotel to get food from the Waffle House. The next night we had dinner at a decent steakhouse. The following night was dinner from an up-scale sports bar and restaurant, where I apparently looked mad enough to get free dessert. I’m still not sure how that happened, but I didn’t complain about the delicious cheesecake that we didn’t have to buy. The following night was dinner at Benihana, which is a fun place to watch the Japanese guy cook your food directly in front of you. And, again, we got free dessert without saying anything bad or derrogatory. I can’t tell if I look mad all the time or if people think I look like an influential food critic. Regardless, I’m going to see if I can get this to work in more places.

Other than that, though, the trip was quite uneventful. Except for the part when they forgot, or neglected, to place our luggage on the plane for the return trip. We had a direct flight from Atlanta to Peoria, but our luggage apparently wasn’t scheduled to depart at the same time. Since it was the return flight, it wasn’t absolutely terrible for me, except that I wasn’t going to be home for more than 20 hours before driving to Columbus, so that did put me in a bit of a bind. Overall, though, it worked out okay. The luggage was delivered around 9am the next day, I made it to Columbus in good time, and I’ll not be returning to that particular airline for the remainder of my travels.