A Week of Travel

I just got back from the better part of a week of ass-kicker travel: BOS-DFW-CRP-DFW-BOS; Monday through Thursday. It included two consecutive days of ~4 AM wakeups… I found them highly objectionable.

The trip was a day of meetings, followed by a day of crawling all over a building. I am pretty dynamic when I do this stuff—weighted down with tools all over my belt, eager to crawl into dark confined spaces, hopping up on tables to look into suspended ceilings…. I overheard one of my colleagues whisper something like… “… he’s kinda like Jackie Chan, huh?” Heh.


But hey—at least I didn’t have to slog through the snowstorm in Boston this week. Sorry Sarah!


One interesting thing I tried out for the first time was automated check in (at an Embassy Suites). I was quite impressed: I bypassed a bunch of technophobes standing in line for the front desk.


It is yet another interaction where I am fine with eliminating the human touch: “Look—simple transaction: here is my information, here is my credit card, you give me a room key. Done.” Heck—you can even print out your boarding pass at this machine… pretty slick.

One consolation for this painful travel schedule was a not-too-bad sunrise, en route CRP-DFW.


During my long (3 hour… ugh) layover at DFW (thanks American!), I ended up wandering into the “Samsung mob!le travel lounge”… it was a nice, quiet lounge with a calming décor and power plugs.


I could plug in, put my noise-cancelling head phones on, and get some work done (after finishing a coffee and a scone).


Samsung seems to be all over branding at DFW (“Samsung mobile charging station…”), but I don’t understand how this makes much business sense. It’s a pretty fair chunk of an airport to rent out that does not generate any direct revenue. It's as nice as any StarAlliance or other lounge, but without somebody keeping out the riffraff (like me!). There was no “host” (read: salesman) coming to pester me… they just showed off their products in the cases between seats. Weird. Perhaps this is the advertising equivalent to peacock's feathers--"We are successful and well-fed enough that we can grow these ridiculous feathers... that's why you should reproduce with us!"

But hey, I found it nice enough that they get blog-kudos (and thus exposure to my tech-geek crowd of friends) out of it. Although I must mock them for having a BSOD on their highly prominent display out front:


Anyway, home for now… but off to Lincoln, Nebraska next Monday. Yep, the home of CliffsNotes and neo-Nazi hate literature. Awesome.