Squeeeeeeeee…

Today was less fun than other days I’ve had.

Started off packing for the trip. This involved folding laundry. We all know how I feel about laundry. I’m currently in the airport, waiting for Air Canada to take me away. In between,

I got viciously lost in South Boston. Google maps may be good in some places, but it knows nothing of Boston. Google maps has this quaint affection for street names. Ha. Boston doesn’t use street names. They tilt the street signs at 45 degree angles so that you can’t tell which of the streets is which.

I got so lost that I had to reschedule my morning client visit. That sucks. I was still lost when I stopped to buy a firewire drive to take to canada and give to the customer. I was in transit from 9:15 until 12:45. I would say I was thoroughly disoriented and saddened by that fact from around 9:55 to 12:30. And yes, I had the best maps money can buy.

Along the way, I ran a red light. In front of a cop. In my defense, it was both red and green (green arrow on the bottom, red light on the top. People honked at me. I was confused, so I edged through the intersection to let the people behind me turn left. I looked up and saw the officer give the universal gesture for you, here, now. He asked why did you come through the light? you were fine where you were. He wound up taking pity on me and giving me a warning. Minnesota plates, still working their magic.

Literally three blocks later, I saw something amazing. A dump truck was parked to my right (I was at the front of a red light line in the right lane). Said truck hauled up over the sidewalk and made a sweeping U turn, against the light, in front of the “no U turn” sign. it was an awe inspiring bit of blatant might making not-quite-right.

The rest of the afternoon is something of a haze. I remember having to get security to let me in to our office because some officious janitor locked the door (and we don’t have keys). I remember trying to install linux on two different machines, one of which had bad memory and the other had a bad disk. I remember talking down an outraged customer who couldn’t understand why we didn’t fly out to personally install every single copy of our software (and no, of course he didn’t have a support contract).

However, the drive to the airport was uneventful, my veggie burger at the airport food-stand was tasty, and it looks like my flight isn’t too full.

Hopefully my luck is trending back towards “good.” I have to do an install tomorrow on a linux variant that I’ve never even been able to install, and not for lack of trying.