I’m back in the birthplace of Waffle House and Pappadeaux: Dallas, TX. Well, Richardson, TX actually, but who’s counting? And fine, okay, so Dallas/Richardson/Plano/whatever may not really be where Waffle House and Pappadeaux got started, but it’s where I first experienced these two fine examples of culinary excellence, so they’re what Dallas says to me.

Anyway.

So I’m here in Dallas. Just outside Dallas, in Richardson. Which is right next to Plano, where the client is and where I’m working, only my hotel is in Richardson. Which is a suburb of Dallas. Which is where I am, minus the long explanation. Land of Waffle House and Pappadeaux, as previously established.

Dinner last night was the ever-Waffle-icious Texas Cheesestake sandwich plate with the hash browns scattered, smothered, covered, and chunked at my favorite restaurant in the world, Waffle House. Tonight it’ll be crawfish etouffe at my other favorite restaurant in the world, Pappadeaux. Tomorrow will be hospital cottage cheese and jello after I’m admitted to the ER for completely clogged arteries and coronary disease. And cramping cheek muscles from a permanent ear-to-ear smile.

But for now, here’s the view:

Notice the young blonde hottie sunbathing by the pool. I felt like a total perv, taking her picture all surreptitious-like. But if I’m going to be honest, I guess I have to admit that taking 65 pictures was excessive. I’m kidding, it was only 64. But I should have stopped at 40. Everything past that was pervy.

…and here’s the room:

And now I’m off to either see a movie or buy a mask at Scuba Toys or shop for a Road King or … whatever.

This is supposed to be the View From Huntsville, AL, but Delta Airlines didn’t cooperate tonight. I missed my connecting flight here at ATL (by about 3 minutes, fuckinghelldammit), so now I get to write to you from Room 320 of the palatial (and really not all that bad if I’m being honest) Wellesely Inn & Suites hotel. For free, thankyewverymuch — not that Delta wanted to spring for it.

In a perfect world, I would have had about an hour and a half between flights when connecting through Atlanta tonight, giving me plenty of time to make my flight to Huntsville. But Atlanta got a little rain today, and when it rains in Atlanta Air Traffic Control loses their freakin’ mind and start diverting and cancelling flights. So my flight’s departure time out of Cleveland was delayed. First for 15 minutes, then for 30, and the final tally was nearly two hours. But still, if the flight had left when they tried to leave at the 2 hour mark, I would have made my connection. Close, running-through-the-terminal close, but doable.

But then the airplane wouldn’t start. I shit you not: they couldn’t start the engine. So they brought in an “aircar” that was supposed to somehow magically invoke a mighty wind that would huff and puff and blow the engine into starting. (But it probably wasn’t nearly as erotic as that sounded.) But the first aircar they got wasn’t a pro — couldn’t… um… “blow” hard enough. So they brought in the Big Momma aircar and she blew that engine good! Started it right up.

But it took half an hour, which ate into pretty much every second of flex time I had to dash from this flight to the next one once we got to Atlanta. And then when we finally got to Atlanta, they couldn’t park the freakin’ plane — our gate was occupied and we sat on the tarmac for another 20 minutes.

So the end of that part of the story is that when I finally got into the terminal and did my OJ run to my gate (the Hertz OJ run, not the crazy knife-wielding OJ run), I got there just in time to watch my flight leave. Last flight of the night, too.

Well.

So I’m stuck in Atlanta for the night. And I needed a hotel room. But here’s the thing about missing a flight and needing a room: the airlines don’t like to pay for it, even when it’s their fault. And they don’t have to pay if they can claim “force majeur” (aka “weather”). Which they tried to do in my case. Until I gave the nuclear smackdown to an escalating food chain of customer “service” agents who all tried to say “no” until I got to the top dog guy in the goofy red jacket. And I politely started my conversation with him by saying “I should warn you, I’m not going to take no for an answer” and then I proceeded to calmly explain that while my flight was indeed delayed by weather in the first place, I would have made the connection anyway if the freakin’ plane had started. Which was clearly a mechanical problem, and not weather. And that I still might have made my connection if my plane had been able to park once it got here. Which was clearly a parking problem, and not weather.

So to make a long story short, I am typing this in my comped room. And I get to go back to the airport tomorrow morning to try to fly standby on the 8 am flight, because I have 12 clients in Huntsville, AL who are expecting me to show up at 8 am tomorrow to train them. Fun, fun, fun.

Anyway, here’s the view…

And here’s the room…

And now I’m off to bed.

Greetings from room 202 of the Hampton Inn Erie South in Erie, PA. I somehow managed to get this room at a special rate — the Reflections of Lake Erie package, but I have no idea what the deal behind it is.

I booked the room online and selected the “best rate” option and this popped up at the same cost as the regular rate, but with a few bottles of wine and an in-room movie for free. When you use the words like “included at no cost,” then you’re speaking my language, so I’m staying here on the Reflections of Lake Erie package. Too bad I don’t drink — I have vouchers for three free bottles of wine from a local winery. The bad news, though: it’s a local winery. But I also have that free movie waiting, so tonight is Decision Time: King Kong, Big Momma’s House 2, or porn. It’s a tough call…

In the meantime, here’s the View From Here pictures for you to enjoy while I browse the “Adult Desires” selections (The Contractor, Xtra Filthy Sex, and Do My Slutty Wife, among others) and see if the maid left any hand cream in the bathroom.

Here’s the room:

And here’s the view:

And now… Movie Time!

The Sales team here at the office has a whiteboard on which they frequently write “inspirational” messages that, while they are no doubt deeply profound and life-changing to the sales staff, are impenetrably baffling for the rest of us. But the white board seems to have fallen out of favor in recent weeks, because it’s had the same message posted on it for weeks now:

“I’ll get you, Harry Potter!” — Lord V.

Every day I come in and look at that, and every day it just seems … incomplete. So yesterday, I completed it. I added a line to it:

“You’ll get me what? A prezzie???” — Harry P.

No one else in the office has noticed. They probably never will. But every time I walk by and see it now, I get a secret little smile out of it.

As the resident trainer here at the small company I work for, I’m responsible for developing training programs and material for both our external customers and our internal employees. My current project is for the employees and it’s A) driving me insane and B) a delicious exercise in irony.

Background: Our CEO is a Mac devotee. He loveslovesloves them to the extent that everyone here uses a Mac and we have only one Windows machine in the entire organization (it’s used for testing purposes) and it is rarely even turned on. Everything here runs on Mac, right down to our website. Coming into this as a Windows guy from all the way back to 3.11, this has been a bit of an adjustment for me. Fortunately, most of the apps I use on my Windows machine are also used here at work on the Mac without too many major differences: Firefox, Word, Excel, Powerpoint — and Mac’s cleverly named “Mail” works pretty much like any other mail application out there. Pretty much.

But a new edict has recently come down from on high. Our Mac devotee CEO has decided that we will no longer use Microsoft Word or Powerpoint. Instead, we will now use Pages and Keynote, two applications that are part of the Mac OSX operating system and are similar to Word and Powerpoint — but different. And it has fallen to me to put together a quick-start guide for our users who don’t know these applications. Users like me.

So I’ve been trying to play along in the pro-Mac spirit and create these user guides in Pages rather than in Word. But I’ve been having a hell of a time doing it, partly because I don’t know how to use Pages. What would have taken me just a few hours in Word has taken me days in Pages. Now, to be honest about it, part of that time was taken up with me travelling and doing my training in San Jose, and a lot of the rest of the slack has been me wasting time because I keep getting bored with trying to teach this old dog new tricks. But quite a bit of it has been just plain wasted time because I’m using Pages instead of Mac. Because, to be fair, Pages does what it does fairly well. But to be honest, Pages doesn’t really do all that much. And it also sucks.

And that’s where the irony comes in. Because I have given up on using Pages and am now writing my Pages quick-start guide in Word.

Greetings from San Jose, where I’m suffering from a persistent earworm of Dionne Warwick asking me if I know how to get here. There are a lot of different ways I could go with that, comedy-wise, but the bottom line is that I’m stuck in San Jose with Dionne Warwich singing in my head. I’m screwed.

But what the hell… At least I’ve got a view, right? Wrong:

Well, okay, but I have a nice room, right? Sort of:

It’s a handicapped room — my “closet” rod is three feet off the ground so my jacket’s sleeves are brushing the floor, and the shower has grab rails and a hand-held showerhead. But what the heck, my butt-crack has never been cleaner.

I think the clocks here at the office are broken. My watch too, and the system clock on my laptop. They all seem to be moving backwards. It’s been 37 hours since my last post, but it’s only 2:15.

Djan karet – “The hour that stretches.” I’m living that hour today. Eight of them, in fact. I’m in the office, at work, for 8 long, stretching hours. They’re stretching because at the end of them, on the other side, is 10 way-too-short days of this:

Curaçao. In the western Caribbean, just off the coast of Venezuela, with some of the best scuba diving around, it’s my favorite place in the world and I haven’t even been there yet. We’ll be there for ten days and we’re leaving tomorrow morning. It hurts me that I’m not there already.

Come on, clock. Move!

This lyrical joke is so obvious, I’m ashamed at myself for using it and I’m feeling actual physical pain over it — and yet I’m doing it anyway. Do you know the way to San Jose? I do: Drive to Burbank Airport and catch Southwest Flight #182. Easy-peasy.

Anyway… So yeah, I was in San Jose today. Just a quick one day up-and-back trip, but I’m still delivering for you readers with another View From Here installment. I didn’t stay in a hotel this time, but the client did have me wait in their conference room until they were ready for me. So here’s my “room” in San Jose:

And here’s the view from the conference room window:

And just for fun, here’s why I do everything I can to not fly Southwest:

Moooooo…….

If it’s Tuesday, it must be Longmont, Colorado. Ha.

I was in Longmont, CO in November, and here I am back in Longmont, CO again today. Same hotel, even. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Well, the view changed, at least. You can follow the link above for the view last time, and here’s the view this time around. First, my room, right next to the elevator because they cleverly ignored my routine request for a room away from the elevator:

And the view, this time looking off to the east:

The last time I was out here I got to have dinner with my half-sister, who lives in the next town over. I don’t have time to do that again this trip, but I’ll make time for a quick bite at the finest restaurant in all the land: Waffle House. Yes, Longmont has a Waffle House: Unit 1072. Can you believe Beth won’t consider moving here?