Halifax 2008
From Ben's Writing
Day -1, and counting.
I've got everything I think I need for this meeting prepared: Laminated booklets which contain the mechanical operation of the machine, etc. But even with all of that done, I'm still not sure what this meeting is about. I'd hoped it would be the one and only, where we'd cover the details of the final trip, when I'd install everything and be done; but as it turns out, it sounds like more of a meet and greet. Which, after reflecting on it some, makes sense since we've never meet and we'd both be better off knowing who we are dealing with—even if it's a little aggravating, if only for it's time consuming nature.
I really want to get moving on this project, and bureaucracy and I have never been on friendly terms.
But I'll bite my lip, while smiling politely, and make the good impression. I know that may sound harsh, but consider it this way: I'm more interested in getting the work done, than talking about it.
Day 0
After 45 minutes in the air, we arrived in Dallas. Which, is, well, one of the most poorly designed airports I've had the (dis)pleasure to visit, or recollect.
We landed in what the call "Concourse A", which I take is a term used to groups gate numbers. My next flight, 2 hours later, was in "Concourse C" which could be seen from 'A' but was on the other side of the airplane parking-lot: meaning I had a bit of a trek ahead of me, as the two (actually three, since there was "Concourse B" that I did not visit) were only connected near the center of the "Concourse's".
On nice thing can be said about "A": it has a train. But, considering the time I had available, I decided to walk my way over to "C". Sometimes I took the moving floor, or "horizontal" escalators, while at other times I just walked. (The hard floors make a strong case for good footwear|my sandals, while giving me the relaxed appearance in fact contributed more to tension than anything else, other than going through security, that always seems to set me off, but I find that chatting them up generally calms my nerves.) The walk took an hour and 20 minutes, give or take, but partially because we crossed a time zone, and not because I was fooling around (given my serious nature, we should be rather obvious and unnecessary to remind you of it).
I bought a coffee along the way. Searched for something familiar, like Starbucks, but the lines detoured me to another less populated establishment. Lets just say that if Starbucks coffee is the McDonald's of coffee, then this place was the grease bin at a Mom and Pops place in the Southern US, where fried chicken is used in place of such staples as rice and pasta in other parts of the country. But I shouldn't give South a bad rap. The coffee was just bad, but I drank it anyway. By this point of the day I was already felling like having a nap, even after my starting my fourth caffeinated brew of the day.
In "Concourse A" there was a train, and it looked newer and flashier than "B", but I was quite glad about that fact—after siting in the Madison airport listening to very loud muzak and how unsafe other people's luggage was, I'd had my fill of uninformative background noise. This is not to say they don't warn you about things in Detroit, they are just less repetitive about it, and they treat you to only the background noise of a airport, not forcing any elevator, claustrophobic inducing play lists. That said, you could smoke "in designated areas," so I guess you win some and you lose some. I'm glad, even as an ex-smoker, that smoking has had such a stigma attached to it. I can't express how nice it is to eat a meal or go for coffee without smelling like an ashtray.
Surprisingly, I'm not all that nervous about the meeting tomorrow. I'm just disappointed at how little I was able to get done for it, and how little| at least I think|will come from it.
Funny thing happened in the Madison security check-out (or whatever you want to call it, half your ticket pays for it, so it might as well be a transaction). I had four laptops to go though, meaning I had six bins to pack, plus removing my ever so dangerous sandals (Which they we kind enough to push through first, so I could stop stepping on all the junk on the I-was-last-vacuumed-when-we-built-this-place carpet. After managing to get everything through, one of the security personnel was kind enough to help me wrangle up all my laptops. Hi comment, the punch line of this paragraph, was that he imagined the two OLPC machines were mines, and the other two we for my "kids". I nodded in agreement, thinking maybe I should be using one of the OLPC machines, my professional life might a little less complex... "What? You want to chat, listen to music, play games and read about interesting new discoveries, as well as those of the past? Wow! That sounds fantastic! Sign me up post haste."
I continued to chat with him for a while, as I packed my bags and put on my shoes. I told him how I was going to be involved in taking 100 to 200 computers down to Bolivia. And how I was currently off to Halifax to speak with the people who the Charity Fund I was working for have worked with very successfully in the past. And also how they expertise and contacts would make the donation progress more cleanly. He mentioned that it would be the rainy season now and to watch out for floods, but I told him that: first, I was only going to Halifax this trip; second, I was going actually going to Bolivia at a later date, most-likely outside of the rainy season; and that finally, I was going to be visiting the city of La Paz, which, given that it is one of the highest cities in the world, would be one of the cities in the world that would be least susceptible to flooding|well, from water anyway; who knows how the mud reacts up there.
As I left he wished me well on both the trips, and that is sounded like a very interesting venture.
Back in Detroit, the noise is growing more and more as people start arriving and my concentration is starting to waver. I've still got about an hour to wait and I'm not sure I can burn any more of it by writing about what I'm doing, other than, of course write about the fact that I am writing. Which might then, in turn, have me writing about me writing in Detroit about what is has progressed over the time I was there, ad infinitum. So I'll save you from the meta-narrative, to overload, like so many others, an already nebulous "smart person" sounding term.
Instead I'll just leave you be, and return to you later with a more coherent and consistent sense of tense once I arrive in Halifax. Sorry, I said I wasn't going to write that way, my bad.
To be finished sometime in the future....
