My very first business trip, day 3
Sep. 20th, 2011 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eveglassThe short version: Lots of hurry up and wait, too much dessert.
Last night's D&D game was quite enjoyable, despite the oddness of Skyping in. We tried video Skype for a while, but the network here just isn't powerful enough to support it for more than a few minutes at a time without horribly lagging. (Yes, I *could* pay for a better connection, but that would require paying money.) Instead we did audio Skype and I video-ed in at key moments. Also, I ate room service for the very first time that I can remember: club sandwich and caesar salad. It was larger than I expected, and I probably would have been very happy just eating half of it, but some odd compulsion in my brain made me eat the whole thing. At least I got my $30 worth. (Yes, really. And I swear my boss is okay with it.)
After the game I took a shower and discovered that my towels and toiletries are multiplying. I expected the Fairmont Royal York to be like many hotels I'd stayed in, where if you want your towels replaced you put them on the floor or in the bathtub or something, and otherwise you just keep them. And, indeed, the hotel staff did not take away my used towels that were hanging on the back of the door. Instead, they left them where they were and put fresh ones on the rack where they'd come from. So instead of three bath towels in the room, now I've got five. I'll just keep using the same ones, though, because I'm worried if I start using the new ones, my bathroom will soon be so full of towels I won't be able to actually take a shower.
Similarly, they hotel staff just replaced the shampoo, conditioner, soap, etc. that I'd used, even though the little bottles were still in the bathroom, clearly undepleted. So if anyone wants lemon-scented hotel-sized shampoo, conditioner, bath gel, body lotion, or soap, now's the time to tell me. They also stock a shower cap and a shoe mitten (some sort of microfiber cloth to polish your shoes; also works well on computer screens). They do not stock toothpaste, but that's because it's part of the "overnight kit" that you can purchase for $12.50. (Also included: toothbrush, razor, shaving cream, deodorant.)
So. Three paragraphs in and I'm still not at today yet.
Woke up early this morning. I was planning on sleeping in and only going down to work at 8:30, but by 8:00 I was already awake, dressed, up-to-date on my facebook, and hungry. So I went downstairs to find the our boardroom HQ empty (Agneta the Boss was at the Board of Directors meeting and Christian the Event Planning Coworker was making sure they were all set), and a lovely breakfast spread set up in the corner: pastries, spreads, fruit juice, tea and coffee, and about a dozen glasses and plates. Now, I'd seen the banquet event order; I knew we'd only ordered breakfast for three people. Yet here were these dozen glasses. I was confused. Very confused. Christian later confirmed for me that this sort of thing is normal and I shouldn't read too much into it. I guess they assume you're going to forget you already had a glass and just take another one. Instead, I had a croissant, some orange juice, and some tea, and felt much better, or at least much less hungry.
The first order of business for the morning was stuffing drink tickets into the 500+ delegate badges. (See what an exciting life I live?) I was about a tenth of the way through when my brain woke up enough to do some quick mental calculations and realize we had a problem: each delegate was getting four drink tickets (to split between our two evening receptions), and there were 550 delegates, but we'd only ordered 1,000 drink tickets. Which meant we were going to be short by half. So when Christian arrived as I was finishing up, I got him to order more (and at $9 a drink ticket, underestimating by half is an expensive oversight).
It was around this time that I discovered problem #2 of the morning: our laptop was gone. See, the Board of Directors had shipped their 10 laptops and 10 projectors to the conference from Vancouver... and they were lost. Gone. No one knew where. And it was still far too early for anyone to be awake in Vancouver to tell us the tracking number. So Christian had lent the Board our office laptop, and we no longer had one. I, on the other hand, wanted to print some stuff for the registration table, so I brought down my own personal laptop to do it. (The missing laptops showed up around mid-afternoon.)
Made up the documents. Went to print. Discovered problem #3: in an extremely unusual circumstance for my Mac, I apparently didn't have the correct drivers for the printer. I could download them, yes, but at the connection speed I was getting in the hotel (remember: faster connection = more money) it would take about half an hour. Oh, well. Nothing for it, and I didn't really have anything better to do, so I downloaded the drivers and got things printing.
By now it was about 9:45. (Yes, 850 words and 20 minutes of typing and I'm not even at mid-morning yet.) There's a knock on the door of the boardroom, and standing there is my right-hand gal for the weekend, Shruti. Shruti's new to Canada (from India), works in the field, and had asked Agneta the Boss if she could get comped her registration fee for the meeting if she worked for us. Agneta agreed, and there we were.
Sadly, there wasn't actually that much work to be done until the rest of the drink tickets arrived. The reg desk didn't open until 3:00. So we sat around and chatted a bit until Christian came back and suggested we put out our banners. We couldn't put them all out, since there were still rooms in use by other conferences, but we pulled them out of the boxes and set some up in our registration area. This was particularly comical since the banners were much taller than I was, and setting them up properly required me to stand on a chair. Yes, hobbit Julie strikes again!
After that we brought out the giant tablecloth-covered laundry bin full of delegate satchels (remember that from yesterday?) to put in the registration area. So there was lots of unloading of delegate satchels, and then lots of reloading delegate satchels when we brought the now-empty bin back into the boardroom. I swear, if I spent six months without seeing satchels, it won't be long enough.
While we were doing all this, lunch was served: salad, sandwiches, and dessert (chocolate tortes for Christian and I, plain berries for vegetarian Shruti). I had some salad, half a sandwich, and some berries. I looked longingly at the torte, but my bloodstream was already full of sugar from breakfast and the macaroons I'd had over the course of the morning, so in the end I just left them be. I felt bad for the chef, but I was coming quickly to realize that an overabundance of food is just a fact of conference life.
After lunch Christian brought back the office laptop, so I brought mine back up to my room, and by the time I'd come down, the drink tickets had arrived. So Shruti and spent a fun-filled 45 minutes tearing drink tickets, stuffing drink tickets, and just generally getting fed up with drink tickets. (Oh, the excitement!)
There was a knock on the door, and some food-and-beverage people appeared with a tray of coffee and coffee-serving accoutrements. They stuck around just long enough for me to get confused before realizing they were, in fact, in the wrong room. They apologized profusely, but Shruti and I had the taste for tea, so we finished up with the drink tickets and went downstairs to Second Cup, which I charged to my room. Because, hey, I could.
Then back upstairs to drink our tea, relax just a little, and start setting up the reg desk. Pamphlets! Badges! Folders! Inserts! Stuff! It took us slightly over a half-hour, but we eventually got ourselves set up exactly for 3:00, right when registration was supposed to open. Our first two volunteers also showed up. See, we're getting a bunch of nurses from one of the Toronto clinics to take shifts at the reg desk all week, which will probably be very helpful during tomorrow's rush, but was somewhat less helpful when we were getting one registrant every 10 minutes or so.
The first two hours at the reg desk were mostly spent chatting and signing in the occasional person. We had a couple of small issues with badges that were either lost or not printed at all, but on the whole things went pretty smoothly. The last hour just dragged. No one really showed up to register, so the four of us spent most of our time in that awkward "I don't really have anything in common with this new person except what we're doing right now" conversation. Agneta the Boss showed up towards the end, finally out of her Board of Directors meeting... and she brought dessert. Yes, more dessert. Tea biscuits, tartlets, brownies. Y'know, stuff that the Board of Directors hadn't eaten but it would be a shame to have it go to waste. We left it out on the registration table, and I had a tea biscuit (bad Julie! Too much food!), and by the time we closed registration at 6:00, the plate was about half-consumed.
I went back to my room feeling exhausted. I had no idea that sitting around and doing mostly nothing could be so tiring! I suppose it was the forced social facade I was wearing all day, the strained initial conversations, that did it. I was so tired that I actually took a nap for a half hour after I'd checked my email and changed out of my suit.
But not too long! Because at 7:15 I got to meet Heather Dale and her husband Peter for dinner! They took me to a wonderful sushi place called Sushi Time. (On Queen, between Spadina and University.) The food was great, and it was most likely the cheapest meal I'm going to have all week: $15 with tax and tip included for my share. And, oh, what a share! Gyoza! Bento box! (My favorite!) Red bean ice cream! (Also my favorite!) Tea!
We geeked out about roleplaying, fantasy, and sci-fi, and it was just what I needed after a long day of strained conversation about "where are you from?" and "have you been working at the clinic long?" It was great seeing them both. I don't get to do it nearly enough.
I realized on the walk back, mind you, that it was perhaps not the wisest decision I've ever made to have three cups of green tea on a night I want to have an early bedtime. Yes, it doesn't have the same punch as coffee, but green tea will sneak up on you. So I got back to the room, put on a bathrobe and turned down all the lights, and started writing. After this I'm going to take a shower and hope it calms me enough that I'll be able to sleep well before my 5:45 wake-up tomorrow morning. Ugh! So early! But breakfast for the CFAS staff is served at 6:30 and I need to have everything up and ready to go by 7:00, when the delegates will descend upon us like well-dressed, well-mannered Viking hordes.
Tomorrow I think I'm going to wear my red crushed-velvet suit jacket. I've been noticing that as you look across the lobby and the convention floor, pretty much all you see is black. Maybe you'll see some cream or muted orange, but it's pretty much all black. I think it would be great to be "the woman in red." I think I can pull it off. Hopefully it won't be too warm.
So that's it. Very early morning and long day tomorrow. Now for bedtime. G'night all.
Last night's D&D game was quite enjoyable, despite the oddness of Skyping in. We tried video Skype for a while, but the network here just isn't powerful enough to support it for more than a few minutes at a time without horribly lagging. (Yes, I *could* pay for a better connection, but that would require paying money.) Instead we did audio Skype and I video-ed in at key moments. Also, I ate room service for the very first time that I can remember: club sandwich and caesar salad. It was larger than I expected, and I probably would have been very happy just eating half of it, but some odd compulsion in my brain made me eat the whole thing. At least I got my $30 worth. (Yes, really. And I swear my boss is okay with it.)
After the game I took a shower and discovered that my towels and toiletries are multiplying. I expected the Fairmont Royal York to be like many hotels I'd stayed in, where if you want your towels replaced you put them on the floor or in the bathtub or something, and otherwise you just keep them. And, indeed, the hotel staff did not take away my used towels that were hanging on the back of the door. Instead, they left them where they were and put fresh ones on the rack where they'd come from. So instead of three bath towels in the room, now I've got five. I'll just keep using the same ones, though, because I'm worried if I start using the new ones, my bathroom will soon be so full of towels I won't be able to actually take a shower.
Similarly, they hotel staff just replaced the shampoo, conditioner, soap, etc. that I'd used, even though the little bottles were still in the bathroom, clearly undepleted. So if anyone wants lemon-scented hotel-sized shampoo, conditioner, bath gel, body lotion, or soap, now's the time to tell me. They also stock a shower cap and a shoe mitten (some sort of microfiber cloth to polish your shoes; also works well on computer screens). They do not stock toothpaste, but that's because it's part of the "overnight kit" that you can purchase for $12.50. (Also included: toothbrush, razor, shaving cream, deodorant.)
So. Three paragraphs in and I'm still not at today yet.
Woke up early this morning. I was planning on sleeping in and only going down to work at 8:30, but by 8:00 I was already awake, dressed, up-to-date on my facebook, and hungry. So I went downstairs to find the our boardroom HQ empty (Agneta the Boss was at the Board of Directors meeting and Christian the Event Planning Coworker was making sure they were all set), and a lovely breakfast spread set up in the corner: pastries, spreads, fruit juice, tea and coffee, and about a dozen glasses and plates. Now, I'd seen the banquet event order; I knew we'd only ordered breakfast for three people. Yet here were these dozen glasses. I was confused. Very confused. Christian later confirmed for me that this sort of thing is normal and I shouldn't read too much into it. I guess they assume you're going to forget you already had a glass and just take another one. Instead, I had a croissant, some orange juice, and some tea, and felt much better, or at least much less hungry.
The first order of business for the morning was stuffing drink tickets into the 500+ delegate badges. (See what an exciting life I live?) I was about a tenth of the way through when my brain woke up enough to do some quick mental calculations and realize we had a problem: each delegate was getting four drink tickets (to split between our two evening receptions), and there were 550 delegates, but we'd only ordered 1,000 drink tickets. Which meant we were going to be short by half. So when Christian arrived as I was finishing up, I got him to order more (and at $9 a drink ticket, underestimating by half is an expensive oversight).
It was around this time that I discovered problem #2 of the morning: our laptop was gone. See, the Board of Directors had shipped their 10 laptops and 10 projectors to the conference from Vancouver... and they were lost. Gone. No one knew where. And it was still far too early for anyone to be awake in Vancouver to tell us the tracking number. So Christian had lent the Board our office laptop, and we no longer had one. I, on the other hand, wanted to print some stuff for the registration table, so I brought down my own personal laptop to do it. (The missing laptops showed up around mid-afternoon.)
Made up the documents. Went to print. Discovered problem #3: in an extremely unusual circumstance for my Mac, I apparently didn't have the correct drivers for the printer. I could download them, yes, but at the connection speed I was getting in the hotel (remember: faster connection = more money) it would take about half an hour. Oh, well. Nothing for it, and I didn't really have anything better to do, so I downloaded the drivers and got things printing.
By now it was about 9:45. (Yes, 850 words and 20 minutes of typing and I'm not even at mid-morning yet.) There's a knock on the door of the boardroom, and standing there is my right-hand gal for the weekend, Shruti. Shruti's new to Canada (from India), works in the field, and had asked Agneta the Boss if she could get comped her registration fee for the meeting if she worked for us. Agneta agreed, and there we were.
Sadly, there wasn't actually that much work to be done until the rest of the drink tickets arrived. The reg desk didn't open until 3:00. So we sat around and chatted a bit until Christian came back and suggested we put out our banners. We couldn't put them all out, since there were still rooms in use by other conferences, but we pulled them out of the boxes and set some up in our registration area. This was particularly comical since the banners were much taller than I was, and setting them up properly required me to stand on a chair. Yes, hobbit Julie strikes again!
After that we brought out the giant tablecloth-covered laundry bin full of delegate satchels (remember that from yesterday?) to put in the registration area. So there was lots of unloading of delegate satchels, and then lots of reloading delegate satchels when we brought the now-empty bin back into the boardroom. I swear, if I spent six months without seeing satchels, it won't be long enough.
While we were doing all this, lunch was served: salad, sandwiches, and dessert (chocolate tortes for Christian and I, plain berries for vegetarian Shruti). I had some salad, half a sandwich, and some berries. I looked longingly at the torte, but my bloodstream was already full of sugar from breakfast and the macaroons I'd had over the course of the morning, so in the end I just left them be. I felt bad for the chef, but I was coming quickly to realize that an overabundance of food is just a fact of conference life.
After lunch Christian brought back the office laptop, so I brought mine back up to my room, and by the time I'd come down, the drink tickets had arrived. So Shruti and spent a fun-filled 45 minutes tearing drink tickets, stuffing drink tickets, and just generally getting fed up with drink tickets. (Oh, the excitement!)
There was a knock on the door, and some food-and-beverage people appeared with a tray of coffee and coffee-serving accoutrements. They stuck around just long enough for me to get confused before realizing they were, in fact, in the wrong room. They apologized profusely, but Shruti and I had the taste for tea, so we finished up with the drink tickets and went downstairs to Second Cup, which I charged to my room. Because, hey, I could.
Then back upstairs to drink our tea, relax just a little, and start setting up the reg desk. Pamphlets! Badges! Folders! Inserts! Stuff! It took us slightly over a half-hour, but we eventually got ourselves set up exactly for 3:00, right when registration was supposed to open. Our first two volunteers also showed up. See, we're getting a bunch of nurses from one of the Toronto clinics to take shifts at the reg desk all week, which will probably be very helpful during tomorrow's rush, but was somewhat less helpful when we were getting one registrant every 10 minutes or so.
The first two hours at the reg desk were mostly spent chatting and signing in the occasional person. We had a couple of small issues with badges that were either lost or not printed at all, but on the whole things went pretty smoothly. The last hour just dragged. No one really showed up to register, so the four of us spent most of our time in that awkward "I don't really have anything in common with this new person except what we're doing right now" conversation. Agneta the Boss showed up towards the end, finally out of her Board of Directors meeting... and she brought dessert. Yes, more dessert. Tea biscuits, tartlets, brownies. Y'know, stuff that the Board of Directors hadn't eaten but it would be a shame to have it go to waste. We left it out on the registration table, and I had a tea biscuit (bad Julie! Too much food!), and by the time we closed registration at 6:00, the plate was about half-consumed.
I went back to my room feeling exhausted. I had no idea that sitting around and doing mostly nothing could be so tiring! I suppose it was the forced social facade I was wearing all day, the strained initial conversations, that did it. I was so tired that I actually took a nap for a half hour after I'd checked my email and changed out of my suit.
But not too long! Because at 7:15 I got to meet Heather Dale and her husband Peter for dinner! They took me to a wonderful sushi place called Sushi Time. (On Queen, between Spadina and University.) The food was great, and it was most likely the cheapest meal I'm going to have all week: $15 with tax and tip included for my share. And, oh, what a share! Gyoza! Bento box! (My favorite!) Red bean ice cream! (Also my favorite!) Tea!
We geeked out about roleplaying, fantasy, and sci-fi, and it was just what I needed after a long day of strained conversation about "where are you from?" and "have you been working at the clinic long?" It was great seeing them both. I don't get to do it nearly enough.
I realized on the walk back, mind you, that it was perhaps not the wisest decision I've ever made to have three cups of green tea on a night I want to have an early bedtime. Yes, it doesn't have the same punch as coffee, but green tea will sneak up on you. So I got back to the room, put on a bathrobe and turned down all the lights, and started writing. After this I'm going to take a shower and hope it calms me enough that I'll be able to sleep well before my 5:45 wake-up tomorrow morning. Ugh! So early! But breakfast for the CFAS staff is served at 6:30 and I need to have everything up and ready to go by 7:00, when the delegates will descend upon us like well-dressed, well-mannered Viking hordes.
Tomorrow I think I'm going to wear my red crushed-velvet suit jacket. I've been noticing that as you look across the lobby and the convention floor, pretty much all you see is black. Maybe you'll see some cream or muted orange, but it's pretty much all black. I think it would be great to be "the woman in red." I think I can pull it off. Hopefully it won't be too warm.
So that's it. Very early morning and long day tomorrow. Now for bedtime. G'night all.
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 04:46 am (UTC)Your hotel's better than that, I hope?
no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 10:08 am (UTC)