If it’s Tuesday, I must be on the road again. Posting from La Grange, GA this time, and I’ll be here for the next 10 days. To be completely honest, I’m actually in a town called Newnan, but for some reason the Corporate Overlord calls this market La Grange, which works for me — after all, ZZ Top doesn’t have a song called “Newnan.”

Anyway, the view here is fabulous. Here, see for yourself.

What that view doesn’t show you is the absolute best feature of the area, visible from the front of the hotel: a Waffle House within walking distance. And another Waffle House on the other side of the highway. I’m smack-dab in the middle of a pair of Waffle Houses. It don’t get much better than that! I had dinner there tonight — a Texas Cheesesteak sandwich and hashbrowns scattered, smothered, covered, chunked and topped. Aaaahhhh…

And now I’m back in my room swigging Diet Pepsi, eating a Moon Pie and watching Big Brother.

La Grange is off to a fine start.

Some wit (halfway, at least) scrawled just the cleverest bit of graffiti I’ve ever seen on the toilet seat cover dispenser in one of the stalls in the men’s room at work: John Kerry Party Hats!

Fun. Nee.

I had to respond, of course. I was tempted to go with something along the lines of “GWB Diploma” or “GWB National Guard discharge papers” but that was a little too obvious, I thought. Instead, I wrote: Typical Republican — so used to having your head up your ass, you think these are hats.

Ha.

A transcript of the notes passed between me and a coworker during the training session:

Oh. My. God. This last 30 minutes could have been covered in 5.

Fortunately, I’m sleeping through most of it.

Speed it the fuck up already!

60 pages to go!

I love beta testing in training.

I’m bored. I’m going to start asking questions in a minute. Then we’ll be here all day.

I love that you have to save to delete.

We’re on slide 42 of 114.

Oh Lord, shoot me now, please. I’m on a break from a training session that is about on par, stupidity-wise, with most of the internal training around here.

Example:

Student: “I’m lost. What page are we on in the book?”

Instructor: “Page two.”

Now, to be fair, the stupid part isn’t that the student was lost by Page 2. No, it’s that we were only on Page 2 after 45 minutes!

The trainer is so bad that I want to strangle her, which is nothing new since I’ve felt that way about her ever since she trained me as a new hire 3.5 years ago. Some things improve with age … and some don’t.

I’m so bored that I’m asking stupid questions now, just to make it interesting, stuff like “…and how would I delete that?” right after she’s indicated the “delete” icon and said we can delete something. And of course answering that simple question first flummoxed her and then took her nearly five minutes to demonstrate.

Only 74 more PowerPoint slides to go…

Cue Carol Burnett singing “I’m so glad we had this time together…” My time in Centralia has come to an end and now I’m heading to the airport to fly home — and doesn’t that phrase sound just lovely? But lest we forget the magic we’ve shared, Centralia and me, here are a few local links we can click on and use to reminisce…

Local news
and the radio station’s nemesis, King Chuck
I particularly recommend checking out King Chuck’s rants against the station’s talk show host on his John Panesko is an Ass page.

Ah, good times, good times…

And with that, I…Am…OUTTA HERE!!!

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

Dangit. One of the two stations here is a country format and they pipe the music through the office PA system. Now, I’m a hard-core classic rock kind of guy, but I do like me some country too, so I’m okay with that.

That reminds me of a joke:

Q: What happens when you play a country music song backwards?
A: You get your house back, you get your wife back, you get your dog back…

Ha.

Anyway… So they’ve got country going in the background, and there’s this one Tim McGraw song that’s in heavy rotation, Live Like You Were Dyin’. And damn but I hate songs that hit you in the heart and make you kinda all teary-eyed when you’re trying to be all mad at the people around you for being stupid.

Cue Corey Hart singing “I wear my sunglasses at night…” because it’s 6:30 pm, the sun is at high noon, and I … am … OUTTA HERE!!!!

My flight out isn’t until 10 am tomorrow, but there’s a flight at 12:40 tonight with 12 open seats and I’m going to be there to try to fly stand-by. If I get on that one it’ll get me to Seattle at 5:00 am, and there’s a 7:00 am flight from there to Burbank with 50 open seats which I’m just about guaranteed to get on. If everything lines up for me (which, dammit, I’m about due for, considering how nightmarish this trip has been), I should get home before I was supposed to leave Alaska.

Meanwhile Doug the Rain Man is talking to me even as I type — while I’m clearly NOT LISTENING TO HIM — still bitching about my software and mooning after the old system. Blah blah blah blah…

Ladies and gentlemen, the Elvis tattoo is getting the hell out of the building!

The guy I’m working with here — let’s call him “Doug” — is having problems pulling a report and he just complained to me for the umpteenth fucking time about it. Normally I would try to care deeply — deeply, I tell you! — about this problem he’s having, but this time around I just can’t. Because he’s not trying to pull the report out of my software, he’s pulling it out of someone else’s, software I don’t know a damned thing about, software he’s supposed to know how to use because he’s been using it for years. Not my problem, bro, handle it yourself.

So Doug came over to me just now, showed me the report, and bitched about how “what we need to do is figure out how to eliminate this column from the report.” And then he stared at me, expecting me to have the answer.

I gave him an answer: So you’ve got a goal now, Doug. It’s good to have goals.

For me, that’s tact.

11:15 pm. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

Logs are loaded, everything worked, I’m heading back to my hotel room.

I’m letting the TM live. I’m too tired for murder right now, and I don’t think even that would end his bleating complaints.

10:20. The biking traffic manager is back. He’s been in his chair for about five minutes and has spent most of it bitching about how much better his old traffic system was.

I’m going to kill him. After he loads his logs. I’ve been here long enough today.