The Business Trip from Hell....

okay, maybe not hell, but definitely purgatory. Suffice it to say I have come out of this weekend's work with 5, yes 5, lieu days. As V. says, and I apologize to my American readers, Youngstown Ohio is the armpit of America. The plant/office is located in an industrial, very run down area of the city. There is absolutely no place near by to eat, and very few places will delivery food. In fact, our hotel was in Boardman which is 10 minutes away - we didn't even stay in Youngstown. So because there was no place to eat, we had to leave the office each day to go have lunch and dinner. And of course, because we don't have keys or an alarm code, we couldn't leave for dinner at night knowing that we wouldn't be able to get back in. So dinner was never earlier than 10:30pm each night. And we had to go back to Boardman to each each meal. Thanfully we weren't living on fast food and were able to get decent food at Friday's, Applebees, Steak & Shake (mmmmmm, I love those shakes), IHOP, and on Sunday night it was Wendy's since NOTHING is open after 10 there is seems. Can always count on Wendy's Late Night pickup window. :)

Anyway, the work went reasonably well, albeit, slowly. Tell me, why when you've told the office that they are having major network changes happening over the weekend, and mail changes, why why why do they think that means that they can come into the office to work on Saturday! Yes, that's right, 12-15 people were in the office that day while we were trying to get our stuff done. I can understand the people that had to get payroll completed because it was the end of a pay period, and we were taking away a "Time and Attendance" application, but everyone else????? What was so important that it couldn't wait? Plus, there was supposed to be some cabling done in the week prior to us going down to ensure that when the network was split, everyone in the plant area could still access what they needed. Was the cable run? Nope. In fact, they were running the cable (correction - my manager ran the cable) on Monday! Yes, Monday! That was supposed to be our last day there. Supposed to be a "just make sure it's all working" day. The day we were supposed to be able to get out by say, 7pm. ,and have a real dinner, a relaxing dinner, one where we could go to the really expensive restaurant that our IT Director told us to eat at, the dinner where we could celebrate the completion of this job, bitch about the work involved, and then go back to the hotel and relax. But no. That was not meant to be. We again, did not get out of there until 10:30.

And to top it all off, the atmosphere in the office was toxic. There were always 2 divisions of our company located at this site. One division was purchased by someone internally, but they chose not to take ALL of the employees that worked at that location. Instead, they laid people off or left them as part of the remaining users that still exist at head office. So now, those who've moved to the new company are acting like their special while those who are part of our original company are being made to feel like lepers. So much so, that they are all located in one area and are referring to themselves as Exile Island. How sad is that?

Anyway, I'm glad it's done. I'm glad to be home. And I am SOOOOO glad to be off for 4 days to go camping. Hopefully the weather will cooperate.

For those of you in Canada have a great Canada Day! For those of you in the US, Happy Fourth of July! And for the rest of you, have a great weekend. I'll be back to update my July 5th doctor's appointment next week.

Ciao