It was snowing when I flew into Luton on Sunday night, freezing – and the car I’d booked kept me waiting outside for ten minutes, so I was cold and annoyed by the time I got in the car. Then things just got worse…. the driver spoke hardly any English apart from the obligatory expletives and the motorway was full, and down to one lane because of roadworks. So he turned off onto back roads, using a GPS to navigate, driving in the dark at 70mph with heavy snow face on and exclaiming “Bloody dangerous driving, snow is straightaway in my car face!” Which was true, and unnerving.
Then the GPS ran out of batteries and it transpired that he had removed the charger cable from the car two days previously as he had thought it was a phone charger. So I had to navigate us through the countryside to Oxford and the hotel, which was under refurbishment, cold and had an ugly looking Sunday warm buffet dinner going. Luckily I managed to persuade the woman working behind the bar to rustle up some sandwiches.
The day of training went well – it was odd working with a totally different bunch of people with totally different worries and concerns, but I think we did ok. As soon as we finished we had to jump into another car back to Luton and back to Spain, arriving in Girona and taking a coach back to Barcelona. I got home at 1 a.m. And they say all that travel is glamorous.
Since then I’ve been nursing a hacking cough and a lost voice which is just beginning to come back three days later. So I’ve been taking it easy at work and catching up on a lot of small jobs instead of working on the EBI videos that I should be doing if I did have a voice. I’ve also finished an island build in SL for vScotEd, a new company newsletter and a few other niggly things.
Now I’m preparing a presentation on SL for a conference in Milan early next week. Found out today that there’s no Net access in the hall where the plenaries are going to be, so I’m going to have to do a low-tech presentation instead of the one I had planned. Originally I was going to do half the presentation in SL in Milan and my colleague Nicky was going to do the other half in SL in Barcelona. But I guess it’s just going to be dull instead.
Curious thing is that in the conference joining information they said “Milan is a very wired city”…