"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Monday, October 18
The Jersey Job, Part I
Every year our company picks a hardy band of Information Technology roughriders to handle the most difficult and dangerous job of all: Disaster Recovery. At stake: major mojo points if you succeed, humiliations galore if you fail. This is the story of one such hero: me.
Day One: A Long Strange Trip
4:50am I never sleep well the night before I have to travel, and today is no exception. When the alarm clock goes off I've been awake on and off for over an hour. I stumble out of bed and into the shower and manage to get through my morning routine without injuring myself (for once).
5:45am After some late additions to my duffel I'm on the way, only ten minutes late. For me, this is good.
Interesting discovery: traffic on highway 183 (the route to the airport and also my job) is 90% as bad at 6:30 as it is at 7:30. Also, the idiots are up early, as always bent on getting in my way. If you can look in your rear-view mirror and see a line of cars stretching back a quarter mile, then look out through the windshield and see nothing but open road - the you're the *sshole I got stuck behind for fifteen minutes.
6:30am Roll into Remote Parking, which is to D/FW airport as Mongolia is to, well, D/FW airport. After a brief stop at security (unlike one of my other co-workers, I didn't pack a knife in my bag) I'm at the gate enjoying an Egg McMuffin by 7:00.
12:30pm And now things really get interesting. After an uneventful three hour flight, we arrive in Newark. After one member of the team is nearly crushed by the sliding doors on the little tram they have, we make it to Hertz to pick up our vehicles. With a fleet of SUVs we look like the FBI rolling into town.
The project leader, who arrived yesterday, has arrived to lead us to our hotel. Unfortunately, he's staying at a different hotel, and has never been to our hotel. Still we have the "Neverlost" (doh!) system...
So we head off into the wilds of New Jersey. After two hours we've nearly crossed the George Washington bridge (twice), found a nice traffic circle and gone round and round like a Ratt, and finally we arrive at the Hilton. The good news: right next door is the Cheap Beer Depot. The bad news: this is not our Hilton. Our Hilton is fifteen miles back towards the airport.
So that's where we go. Memorable moment: "Too late, you missed the- AIEEEEEEE!!" After two brushes with death and a few more with incontinence, we finally get to the right Hilton ("The Wedding Place") in downtown Hasbrouck Heights. One car got separated when we left the airport; those people have been here for an hour and a half.
4:00pm Since we never stopped for lunch on the earlier idiodyssey, we're ready to eat. As we load up in the hotel's van, the boss says, "We'll take the next van and see you at the mall."
Me: "Okay. Wait - did you say at the mall?"
Yes, with all of New York City to eat in, we're going to the mall. From the looks of it we could have magically been transported back to Texas. There's a Best Buy, a DSW Shoe Warehouse, even On The Border.
The place we ate at, though, was called Legal Seafood, and we don't have those down here. If we did it would be staffed by immigrants and called Illegal Seafood (snork).
The best line of the night: our database guy was going on and on about a conference he'll be attending in Las Vegas, talking about things he and his wife will be doing, and how much fun they'll have. The boss asks, "So what's the software you're gonna see out there."
The database guy, dead serious, says, "Software?"
After a few more hijinks we make it back to the hotel, where I immediately crash, as I have to be up at 5:00 the next morning.
Coming Soon: The Jersey Job, Part II: Nothing Here Is As It Seems.
