Virginia

Sunday morning, I'm off to Leesburg, VA for a week. A solid week of color application and theory and production document workflow.

For those of you blissfully unaware of what that means, color application and theory is a fancy way of saying "knowing how to help my print shop customers get the color quality that they expect from my color laser printer." Production document workflow is basically following a "document" through it's lifecycle, from the point in which it's dreamed up, to the point in which the postman sticks it in someone's mail slot. All the steps in between are important and need to be studied and fine tuned for cost effectiveness and efficiency. I already do it. Whole freakin' studies I do. Now, I get to get all the learnin' on the aspects of it relating to color documents (vs monochrome documents such as invoices and bank statements). It will be interesting, yet boring at the same time (unlike this paragraph, which is only one of those things).

So, I'm good for learning, but I'd just mentally adjusted to the living conditions. It's not like a hotel, rental car, restaurant, room service situation. It's a campus in the boonies, where you and 1,000 others are secluded for the week. Luckily, it's got a gym. A good one. Plus, I just found out that several friends are going to be there at the same time. Cool.

Suddenly, as soon as I make my head clear and decide that this week will actually be good, I get the email. The campus has been booked solid, so I get to room at the local Holiday Inn. But, the email says, it has free WiFi, a heated pool, and fitness center! Yay!

Crap! Now, the situation goes from bad to worse. My friends are at the campus, no rental car still, shuttle service between the campus and hotel, and set times for coming and going. Plus, 45 minutes to an hour of wasted "shuttle time" every day. Not to mention that I still have to eat at the campus, as it was made very clear that no other meals will be covered. Totally pissed. Holiday Inn fitness center? Treadmill...

If they would have told me yesterday, I could have talked my way into getting some other sucker booked at the hotel instead of me, but as it's Friday tomorrow, there's no time to notify anyone else of the changes.

Fuck