At 7am my Palm organiser burst into life with a quiet electronic wailing that would perhaps have been quite loud for an ant. My ear - more accustomed to hearing small children across the hallway - heard it and I woke immediately. Knowing that I wasn’t due in the hotel lobby until 9, I started looking for things to do.
I had a shower, a shave, got dressed, checked email, surfed the web for a bit, tidied up a few things, and then checked the time again. 7:30am.
Time travels more slowly in hotel rooms when you know you have no reason to be anywhere else, and nobody in the building who knows you. Breakast television repeats it’s entire contents every 20 minutes or so. You start to notice the slightly different pitches the presenters put on the stories as they too become bored with them.
Of course I cannot write a word about what happened between 9:30am and 4:30pm, for all sorts of professional and ethical reasons. Suffice to say there are not many people on the course, and not all of them are staying at the hotel - meaning I am pretty much here on my own unless I instigate a visit to the bar on an evening. Unfortunately this will mean mingling with the rest of the hotel occupants - and none of them are below 60 by the look of it so far.
At the end of the course this evening, I set about filling a few hours with some kind of entertainment before dinner - and ended up reading other people’s favourite book lists on GoodReads. I’m not sure if I will continue using it forever, but it’s pretty damn addictive if you’ve nothing else to do.
Dinner was a big decision this evening - go for the brasserie (read: bar food), or the restaurant. I chose the restaurant on the reasoning that you might as well find out what it is like at least once during your stay.
It was expensive, but was also pretty good. I had tortellini for a starter, and Chicken for main. The main had a posh name, but it boiled down to roast chicken with potatoes and veg. You might guess at this point that I’m not a huge fan of poncified food. Give me basic, tasty, wholesome food every time. Pudding restored my mood though - steam pudding. The whole lot was washed down with a large glass of Sauvignon Blanc - I’m no wine expert, but I know good wine from bad, and I could have drunk another one but chose not to.
If you’ve never done it, sitting on your own in a restaurant while other tables have couples or groups sat around them is pretty soul destroying. It’s the main reason I upped sticks and left as soon as I finished eating. To avoid staring into space for the entire hour I was there I took a book with me - “Microserfs”, by Douglas Coupland.
Microserfs is the story of a group of developers at Microsoft in 1993, and was perhaps the first book to really explore the lifestyle of the modern software developer - those who came into the industry not knowing a world before MSDOS, or the PC. In many ways it’s better than Coupland’s recent “JPod” because the characters are not as exaggerated - they are believable. I found myself grinning as I recalled the trappings of the world they inhabit - a world I have seen and lived in.
While reading, I came upon a passage describing a network of paths crossing the lawns of the Microsoft campus, and the rumour that Bill Gates watched the path people took across the campus - as though their choices held an importance. I’ve read this before - years ago - and am now wondering; is this a widely held rumour that Douglas Coupland repeated, or did he start it in Microserfs?
I also remember reading about somebody’s father being fired from IBM many years ago - and this too appears in Microserfs. Perhaps it was printed as an extract. I’ll never know - I have a job remembering where my socks are, let alone the source of a story I read perhaps 15 years ago in a magazine.
So. It’s coming up for 9:30pm as I write this. I have brought some DVDs with me (Appleseed, and Appleseed Ex Machina), so will probably watch them to fill my night with fun. I need to call W first though - and find out the real story of how the day went with the girls.