The working week this week began even earlier than usual on account of the requirement to be at Gatwick for a 6.50am flight to Dusseldorf for a two day event in the Netherlands centred around the weighty matter of managed print services and industrial printers. 3:30am is no time to be getting up at the best of times, least of all a Monday morning. The saving graces were twofold: (a) that it was all free, and (b) that it was all laid on with transfers from the airport and so on, requiring only the need to present oneself at Gatwick at the required hour (ungodly). Actually threefold, taking into account the online check in which negated the requirement for an even earlier start.
What a great thing it is, travelling only with hand luggage; a liberating experience marred only by the apparent need to have one's bag searched for cosmetics of the explosive variety and the related requirement to stand behind a young Russian or perhaps Eastern European woman who had also had her bag searched moments earlier and was proceeding to re-pack it with great deliberation and the almost unbelievable lethargy of the young and rebellious, while time ticked by on my honed-to-the-wire schedule. I had to do something to offset my growing agitation, so in a moment of resolute non-Englishness I felt obliged to ask her if she could just hurry it up a bit to allow the security dude to inspect my toothpaste at close quarters and thus facilitate my passage through to the nominally titled departure lounge with just enough time left to snaffle a double espresso and a nice little pastry stuffed with tomatoes and mozzarella before hastening to the gate. I don't know why it is; one of the finest traditions of air travel (certainly my air travel anyway) always seems to involve that last minute rush for the gate. At least it wasn't the sort of outright, sweaty, wine-and Iberian tack-laden gallop that characterised a lot of the trips Posh Bird and I did to Portugal, back in the day.
Safely ensconced on the plane and situated right at the back after the fashion of two sacks of ballast (or what is known in the trade as "trim"), my colleague and I proceeded without further ado to blast through the European airspace in a pressurised metal tube, concerned only with the size of our craft (small) and its method of propulsion (propellors). This was not entirely unwarranted given the way the sodding thing fishtailed alarmingly upon landing and thus giving us the sensation of rapidly approaching death.
Transfer by coach across Germany to the Netherlands ensued to deposit us at the hotel, giving us pause only to reflect upon (a) the phenomenal, psychedelic nature of the carpeting, and (b) the fact that such an early start was not great preparation for a busy couple of days at a business event, before we were whisked off to the company's offices in Venlo to be greeted by a large room full of giant balls, a stage and a sound system playing, rather incongruously I felt, Prodigy tunes while a gaggle of the sort of people found only in Higher Education milled about drinking crap Dutch coffee and catching up about the state of the sector. Hmmm.
In amongst demos and discussions on managed print services and related topics there followed a rather unexpected slot during which two guys presented their interpretation of a company acquisition through the medium of juggling (random, I know, but they were in fact very good). I started to become a bit twitchy, sitting there near the front on my big orange ball, when they started calling for volunteers while 30 odd people looked on. First they picked a red-faced irascible Scot, and then they picked me. WHY. And why do they call it volunteering when you clearly have no real option but to submit to whatever foul thing they want to use you for? Of all the things that might have happened to me on a business trip to the Netherlands, the thing I really didn't see coming was the requirement to stand in front of the assembled throng, holding hands with a sweaty Scot while two madmen juggled a set of skittles back and forth to one another and made us take a step forward right into the middle of it all as they juggled said skittles in front of and behind us, so closely that the skittles were moving my hair as they whooshed past, millimetres from my nose. You just couldn't make it up could you.
On the plus side, the food was good. I wondered if we were to sample some typical Dutch fare, so as we queued for our rations and I spotted a large pan frying equally large quantities of mushrooms that were being added to little trays of salad and dressing, I said to the guy serving, "ooh, what's this?" thinking, you know, that it might be some Dutch thing he'd be pleased to enlighten me about. He gave me the sort of level look usually reserved for complete fuckwits or the very young, and replied, simply yet crushingly, "mushrooms".
Setting aside the rancid carpets, the hotel was quite splendid. There was the extra-thrust jacuzzi, the soft mattress and the extra-fluffy pillows, and the white robe that might have been fluffy had someone remembered to add some fabric softener to the water when it was last washed, but the experience was only moderately marred by the fact that its texture had more in common with sandpaper than towelling. The evening meal was of an Oriental bent, with sake and sushi to start - my first experience of sushi, Luddite that I am, which was surprisingly lovely - and an array of rice and noodle creations all washed down with a decent Tuscan red and the inevitable conversations about how everyone's IT is organised, whose gone with AD, who has cross-platform environments and so on.
Much the same today, except I learned from previous errors and refused to allow myself to be volunteered for anything else, even if it was just setting off a print run, and certainly did not ask any Dutch people about their food. I drank industrial quantities of crap Dutch coffee and the sort of tea you only ever find in Europe, ate for practically an hour at lunch time and managed to avoid holding hands with any sweaty Scots. The couple of hours left at Dusseldorf airport passed in a blur of peering drowsily into a procession of shop windows purveying goods of no real interest, and drinking the world's worst cup of cappucino. At least the flight back was uneventful, notwithstanding the now expected toothpaste-related interrogation before being allowed on my way, bearing a giant slab of Kinder, a big bar of chocolate with hazelnuts, a nice bottle of Limoncello and - a set of juggling balls.
No comments:
Post a Comment