Stick a fork in it, it’s done. Santa Barbara is up and running on its own and I’m hitting the road for home.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Elvis tattoo has left the building!

The Traffic Dept office is on the ground floor here in Santa Barbara, and the windows open to the street right outside. Two of the Traffic Managers here are Lupe and Clara. Several times a day, Lupe’s husband drives by in the course of his job and he always yells out the window:

“Claaaaarrrrrraaaaaaaaa!!!!”

It drives Lupe nuts. I think it’s funnier than hell.

“Claaaaaaarrrrrraaaaaaa!!!!!!!!”

Ha.

On the road again, to Santa Barbara this time. It’s only 80 miles north of home, so it barely qualifies as a “business trip.” I could have flown up but it was actually quicker to drive. Ha. There’s an outside chance I could swing it so I can go home every night, but long hours + minimum 2 hour commute each way + 101 rush hour traffic = Chuck got a hotel room.

MOtel room, actually, because The Company is too cheap-ass to pay the going Santa Barbara rate for business-class hotels. So it’s the Best Western for me this time around, and here’s the crowd pleasing favorite “The View From Here”:

Layoffs are on the horizon here at The Company. My department’s job is to handle converting all of Intergalactic Overlord Parent Company’s radio stations to our software, and we’re just about finished doing it. Once they’re all converted, me and my coworkers are out of a job.

With this in mind, our Human Resources VP has scheduled back-to-back ten-minute meetings today with everyone in my department to help us “explore your options” — and, oh yeah, also to tell us when each person’s individual axe will fall. I’m dressed for the occasion: I’m wearing a T-shirt from one of the stations I converted in Chicago: “Gospel Radio — where the ministry is in the music.”

Yeah, I’m working every angle I can think of. I figure I need the help…

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Elvis tattoo has left the building! You’re on your own, Chicago. Honey, I’m comin’ home!

And now, I’m off to brave the -15 wind chill factor…

It’s snowing like crazy outside, the view hazy and choked with whirls of wind-whipped snowflakes. Inside, me and my co-workers are all lined up at the window, looking out and admiring and commenting on how beautiful it is, staring almost hypnotized by the view.

The locals, on the other hand, have their backs to the windows and are hard at work. They’ve seen it all before. Snow? They’re done with it.

As I’m here in Chicago converting their radio stations to The Company’s software and being a good worker bee, many of my co-workers are in other cities doing the same thing — five stations in the New York, NY area are converting right now, as is Worcester, MA; as is Pueblo, CO; as is Des Moines, IA; as is Huntsville, AL. Ch-ch-changes!

Normally we go to each site with just our conversion team — the Traffic Conversion Specialist (me), the Data Conversion Coordinator (order entry person), and the Account Rep (Sales/Mgmt babysitter). This time around, though, my manager and the training team manager are “observing” the conversion process and are skipping from site to site to spend time at each of them. Ostensibly this is to better educate them on how we do the job we do, but I think it’s really just a big company-paid vacation/shopping expedition for them. I mean, I can understand my manager coming out; she can at least say she’s seeing how her staff works. But the training manager? What’s she observing? There ain’t no trainers here, they’re all back in Dallas at the training center.

But perhaps I’m just cynical. They’ve spent about an hour per day at each of the New York sites, their husbands flew out to join them over the weekend in Manhattan, they didn’t roll into the office here until 9:30 this morning after traveling Monday, one of them went to “lunch” 2 hours ago and hasn’t been seen since, and neither of them has done anything but check email and surf the web since they got here. I’m probably misinterpreting all this, I’m sure there’s damned hard work going on there … somewhere.

Hey, it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Hi there and hello again. Yes, it’s me, back at the keyboard and also back on the road. I’m in Chicago this time around and lemme tell ya, it’s fuggin’ COLD here, kids. Also, it’s snowing! — which might not be a big deal for some of you readers, but gimme a break here, I’m from sunny Southern California — snow’s a big deal to those of us in the palm tree set. So: snow = “Cool!” To give you an idea just how much snow we’ve had, I’m including it in my regular crowd-pleasing feature “The View From Here.”

So, here’s the view from my hotel room window Saturday morning at about 9:00:

…and here’s the exact same view about 20 minutes later:

Now that’s something you don’t see every day in L.A. And that’s why I’m a big ol’ geek and took pictures of it.

This whole Chicago trip is working out pretty well. First of all, The Company put me up in a pretty swank hotel. I usually stay in a Hilton property, which usually means staying in Motel 6’s big brother, Hampton Inn. But this time they put me up in a lux Hilton property: The Drake. Sah-weet!!! Princess Di stayed here once, which I’m pretty sure the Fort Smith, AR Hampton Inn can’t say. And since I’ve reached the diamond level in Hilton’s frequent flier program, they upgraded me to an Executive Suite, which is, as you might have guessed, Executive Shweet!

So that was pretty cool, but even cooler than that: Beth flew out to spend the weekend with me! Shweet! (Also “shwing,” but we won’t go into that.) We had a great time together walking all over downtown and hanging out and enjoying the novelty of being two married adults doing adult things together without a small child insisting on doing small child things. (No worries, Zoe was safe — Beth left her locked in a closet back home with a damp washcloth.)

And because we’re California geeks, we took pictures of each other in the snow:

Beth on the Magnificent Mile:

Me in the same place:

We went into a store to get out of the cold and look for parkas but didn’t buy anything. Here’s the hat Beth tried to talk me into, promising that it looked great on me. Fortunately, the store had mirrors:

Back out into the cold, here’s me and Beth on the Chicago River:

And because, as I’ve already pointed out, I’m a big ol’ SoCal palm tree set geek, this is me making a snow angel on Lake Shore Drive:

Virgin, untouched snow:

Fat guy thrashing around in previously virgin, untouched snow:

Ooh, a snow angel!

So that was fun. After tramping around in the snow and freezing our asses off, we scurried back to the room, wrapped up in the hotel’s complimentary bathrobes, and ordered room service like civilized people with per diem cash and a corporate AmEx card. Here’s Beth recovering from the cold, smoking a cigarette in my no-smoking room, and wondering just who she should call on the cell phone to gloat to next:

And finally, because no entry with pictures is complete without one of Zoe (and also because she wasn’t really locked in a closet), here’s one from a few weeks ago of my little peanut with her long-suffering cat Sparkle:

(No, she’s not strangling the cat, she’s “posing” it. There’s a subtle difference. Really.)

So there you have it, that’s my whirlwind weekend in the Windy City. This was the best travel weekend I’ve had since I started this too-much-traveling job. The weather, the wife and the … (damn, I can’t think of another “w” word) — it was all great.

And so in closing, because I know logging on and checking in here to see if there’s a new entry up is the first thing Beth will do on getting home tonight: Thanks for coming out, honey, I loved having you here with me. I love you.

All together now: “Aaaawwww…..”

But it’s true.

One of the perks I get from working with radio stations is that they all give away promotional items — station crap — and I usually score some at each station I go to. This time around I’ve hit the motherlode.

My station crap catalogue from this trip is:

8 (eight!) T-shirts with the classic rock station’s logo (a cool logo, fortunately)
2 DVDs — Volumes 1 & 2 of the American Folk Blues Festival
13 CDs:

• Martin Scorcese Presents: The Best of the Blues
• Roger Waters The Wall Live in Berlin
• Lynyrd Skynyrd Christmas Time Again
• Lynyrd Skynyrd Thyrty – 30th Anniversary Collection (2 disc set)
• Powerman 5000 transform
• Adema Unstable
• Aerosmith Young Lust: The Aerosmith Anthology (2 disc set)
• Kiss The Best of Kiss
• Monstrosity Rise To Power
• The Allman Brothers Band At Fillmore East (Deluxe Edition) (2 disc set)
• Shadows Fall The Art of Balance
• Jo Dee Messina A Joyful Noise
• Debby Boone Home For Christmas

Damn, I scored! (Except for that Debby Boone CD. Quote from the guy who gave it to me: “You touched it last, you have to keep it!” Fucker.)

But what the hell am I going to do with eight identical T-shirts? And who are half of these bands I’ve never heard of?

I love station crap…

Just because I think it’s funny, the following is an email exchange between me and a co-worker/friend from when I was in Fresno last week:

From: Kevin
To: Chuck
You there?

From: Chuck
To: Kevin
No. Going to lunch now.

From: Kevin
To: Chuck
I’ll e-mail later then. I got some questions on a couple of orders.

From: Chuck
To: Kevin
I’m back, but I’ll tell you in advance the answer is “no.”

From: Kevin
To: Chuck
No…OK.

So what’s up with the Package orders on Station 1. The spots on them are labeled with a break type of Coachs Show…so none of them are scheduling and thus putting quite a bit of money in the pool.

Wass up wit dat?

From: Chuck
To: Kevin
Settle down, Nancy. They’ll be going into special events that may not have been built or applied yet.

From: Kevin
To: Chuck
oh man…and I’ve got my panties in a nice big wad, too.

From: Chuck
To: Kevin
Which pool are you looking at? Monday’s, or just “the pool” in general?

From: Kevin
To: Chuck
November.

From: Chuck
To: Kevin
Dude. You have GOT to chill.

From: Kevin
To: Chuck
can’t…I think something crawled up my ass.

From: Chuck
To: Kevin
Must be management oriented.

From: Kevin
To: Chuck
smells that way.