Four flights of stairs isn’t much.
Until you’ve been up and down them many times in quick succession.
I’m dealing with stone-age american express travel agency that needs forms filled out and faxed. They won’t take electronic copies, and I need to deal with them if I want to expense my business flights out to see my customer.
I could expense travel to my own company, but hey if the end-customer wants to pay for travel to see them provided I jump thru their corporate travel policy hoops… I’m game to try it their way.
Elevator didn’t come and didn’t come, so I went down the stairs with my amex traveller profile forms in pdf format on my usb key. Business centre pc so locked down I can’t get to d: or whatever. Best it will let me do is read a floppy. Great.
Elevator not coming when I push the button from downstairs. Hump back upstairs, try to upload files to web server at home.
Discover pptp not working. Do the hop-skip-jump to dump files on an intermediate machine first via ssh, (thankfully I left ssh open to it!) then rsync to my web server.
Back to the elevator on our floor. Not arriving. Ever.
Down the stairs I go.
Suck pdf’s down onto the business centre pc and print.
Elevator on main floor not coming. Up the stairs I go.
Fill out forms using lots of info from the customer’s internal site for employee id, office address, cost centre, etc etc. Yes I am a contractor but they make me use an employee id etc. It’s like they can’t figure out how to handle contractors and everything has to be twisted and bent to make them fit into their internal systems.
Why am I contracting to this large corporation with all it’s forms-pushing bullshit? I dunno… Seemed like a good idea at the time.
Let’s go fax these forms now that I have them filled out. Oh, elevator going down not working (still). Hump down the stairs. Not able to fax long distance from the business centre here in the hotel. Over to front desk. Not a problem, they fax it gratis, no charge.
Back to elevator. Still no workee. Someone from hotel, looks like facilities (mechanical engineer) guy tells me that they put the elevator into test mode today to conform to fire department rules of how often they should test etc.
While under test, it broke. They are waiting on elevator repair guy.
Nice, you think you could put a sign on the elevator at each floor?
Doorknobs.
Up the stairs I go….
Do a bit of email and other remote work, decide that I’m hungry. I should have gotten something to eat downstairs when I was there just a little while ago. It’s 0130pm, best get down there before the restaurant closes and I am stuck with whatever is in the bar.
Restaurant closed.
Lounge closed.
Kitchen closed.
Up the stairs….
Mini-bar refridgerator empty, unstocked, nada, zippo, zilch.
All this in a Hilton?
Wasn’t it bad enough that the elevator wasn’t working and the supposed T1 internet to every room is likely shared T1 for the whole facility, of which my tests showed I was getting 50Kbit downlink speeds (yes, modem speeds…).
Gaaaah…. I want to go home.
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