eveglass | My very second business trip, day 1

And so begin the 12-hour days. The pre-con meeting started at 10 a.m., and I got back to my room for the night almost exactly 12 hours later. In between was so. much. prep.

I didn't get a good night of sleep last night. My sinuses were acting up and my throat was burning, which meant I woke up around 1:15 am and couldn't fall back asleep. Eventually I resorted to taking a shower in pitch darkness (so as not to ruin my night vision), which was a bit of an adventure but also quite relaxing. It did the trick, anyway. At least until about 5 am, when I woke up again and finally managed to fall back asleep until my alarm at 7:00.

Took yet another shower, got dressed spiffy, and went downstairs to Daly's, one of the hotel's two restaurants, for breakfast. Helped myself to a lovely plate from the breakfast buffet, which was very well stocked, very tasty, and not as expensive as I would have expected, all things considered. (Given that a similar-quality restaurant last year set me back $36 for a muffin, yogurt, juice, and tea, the $31 including tax and tip for an all-you-can-eat buffet is almost reasonable.) And, yes, those are asparagus in the picture. I'm still trying to be healthy, and they were surprisingly tasty. I would have loved to have a yogurt parfait also, but sick Julies who want to rest their throats should not be eating dairy.

After breakfast, I met up with Christian the Boss and Ann the Coworker before heading to the pre-con meeting with the hotel staff. A jaded veteran of last year's conference, I knew what to expect and thus was not intimidated when I saw all the managers. We didn't have a smoothie toast, but they did have some cute plates made up for the three guests: tiny berry smoothies, a few whole berries, some almonds, and a home-made granola bar. I took a picture but was trying not to inundate Facebook too much with my pictures. Anyway, went over all the stuff with the hotel people, including the banquet event orders, and met some of the people who will be my main contacts over the week.

By the time that meeting was over, it was around noon, and Kelly the Hotel Contact brought us up to our main office for the conference. Turns out that the registration desk area is a counter that can be closed off at the end of the night, so I don't have to start shuttling stuff back and forth to the desk like last year, which will be super-convenient.

With that orientation, we all went off on our own for a half-hour. For me, this involved changing into a comfier (though still professional) shirt and jeans, and heading into the Rideau Centre to buy some cold medication. Because if there's one thing I can't be this week, it's sick. (If there's two things I can't be this week, the other would be bright purple. It would just be awkward.) I took one of the pills and it seemed to be working, so fingers crossed.

I joined up with Christian and (eventually) Ann for lunch at the hotel's second restaurant, The Shore Club where I had some walleye fish for lunch. Not *quite* as healthy as I'd intended, given that I didn't know it was fried when I ordered it (seriously: the menu looks like this, so you've pretty much got to listen very attentively to the waiter when they say what each of the things are). But it was served on a bed of vegetables, so at least I can say I didn't get fries.

Anyway, by the time lunch was over, it was sometime between 2:00 and 2:30, and it was time to get to work for real. First item of business: responding to a bunch of work emails. Some of them were last-minute panics about registration, some were last-minute updates to our Board and Advisory Council meeting tomorrow. The thing about being an actual employee this year, and moreover one who's proven herself Useful (tm), as opposed to last year's situation when I was just a temp, is that now people expect me to actually do Useful Stuff (tm). The joys of responsibility.

By the time I was done that and ready to get on with the main business of the day, it was 3:30. And what was that main business, you ask? Delegate badges. About five hundred of them.

I recruited Ann the Coworker to help me. First order of business: ripping things. For her, all the badges, which were in sheets of six. For me: three thousand drink tickets. A girl could get drunk off 3,000 drinks, you know. (A girl would probably die off 3,000 drinks, given that 3,000 servings of wine is about six and a half times my weight.) All that ripping took a while. About an hour and a half, to be precise.

We took a short break at this point to fortify ourselves with caffeine (coffee for Ann and Christian, green tea for me because I was still feeling a bit under the weather). When we got back, we came to the attention of Rohan the Banquet Guy, who decided that a coffee break deserves sweets, so he brought us some cupcakes. Because what I really needed in my life was the temptation of sugar before we go into our sugar binge for the rest of the week. (Sigh.)

Anyway, fortified with caffeine, we went back to work putting the badges, drink tickets, and "exhibitor bingo" cards into the badge holders. After an hour, we'd managed to get through about 110, which sounds impressive until you realize that that number is less than a quarter of the badges we needed to get through. Also, we were starting to get hungry.

We soldiered on. I was starting to worry that I wouldn't get everything done tonight, and tomorrow I'm in an all-day meeting and won't have time to do anything. By 7:00, we were getting really, really hungry and weren't anywhere near done. Christian the Boss went back to his room, and Ann and I ordered room service to our office. While we waited for it to come, I found myself redoing all the exhibitor badges, because when I asked Christian last week whether we should put their company names on their badges instead of their cities, and he said no, apparently what he meant to say was yes. I guess it's good that I've had a lot of practice redoing these badges lately; it only took me about 20 minutes to redo them again, even accounting for some problems with the printer.

By the time I was done, the room service had arrived, complete with its own white-tablecloth-draped table that was brought in specifically for the occasion. There was a little basket of bread with little butter balls and everything. Ann had some tofu-and-veggie kebabs; I had chicken with mashed potatoes and vegetables, which was pretty darn healthy... followed up with half a cupcake, because my willpower finally wore out.

When we finished dinner, it was about 8:30, and Ann made the extremely reasonable observation that she and our other coworker Michelle would not be in the big meeting tomorrow and would be able to do a bunch of the stuff I won't have time to do. Which lightened my load a lot. I decided to just do the faculty badges. There were only 40 of them... how hard could it be?

Friends, never ask that question.

See, it turns out that in addition to the faculty badges, we have a bunch of session chairs with their own folders, for whom little notes needed to be put in their badges to remind them to pick up their folders. The problem: not all the chairs were faculty, so I had to go through my 8 boxes of regular delegate badges finding them. Also, two of the chairs never actually registered for the meeting. Oops.

By the time I was done that, I was really starting to fade. I decided to call it quits while I was ahead, wrote out a 13-item to-do list for Ann and Michelle tomorrow, and printed everything up. Ann and I finally left our office around 10 pm.

I opted not to have housekeeping this morning (opting out grants you a $5 voucher on drinks at the restaurants), but I think I'll take it tomorrow. For one thing, there's some stuff that needs to be replenished. For another, I had to iron a shirt this morning and had a moment of fail when I couldn't figure out how to collapse the ironing board. It's still set up in the corner of my room. Hopefully housekeeping can put it away for me.

So... 10:50 pm. I've got just enough time to take a shower, take my cold medication, and collapse into sleep. I've got to be downstairs sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 tomorrow morning, because the meeting starts at 7:30 and I've got some stuff that needs to get done first. My alarm's set for 6:00. If I get a move on, I might even be able to get eight hours of sleep tonight. And, boy oh boy, do I need it!