Hunt Valley, Maryland 8/8/2012

As I write this, I’m in my room at the Marriott Residence Inn in Hunt Valley, Maryland.  I’m here for the Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention.  The day is waning and I’ve not yet begun waxing nostalgic, but I have been busy since arriving at the hotel.  First, as always, I checked out the Internet.  That was around 4:15pm, I think.  The hotel has both wired and wireless connectivity, so I plugged in to the former and went to dslreports.com to get a bead on the speed of my connection.  It reported 3mb download and 2mb upload.  Not too awful for a hotel.  Problem was, the only connections I was able to make were non-authenticated ones, which is great for web searching, but not so great if you want to read email or log in to a remote system.  HTTPS was being blocked.  So, I spent the first 30 minutes at the hotel on the phone with tech support and got the issue escalated to tier two.  Problem was, tier two couldn’t connect back to the hotel, so they said they’d have to call me back.  Like I believed that would happen.  But the company (LodgeNet) rep (Christie) gave me a ticket number, and I put it away for safe keeping for a later call that I was sure I would be making.

Then I took a walk.  Google Maps on my iPhone (which was working—thanks to a pokey 3g connection) said that the Hunt Valley Inn where the convention is being held is about a 12 minute walk from my hotel.  I discovered that it was actually about a 10 minute walk, but I didn’t discover that until the way back.  It took me about 35 minutes to get there, first because Google Maps showed the wrong location which I didn’t discover until I’d been walking for about 10 minutes, and second because it showed another wrong location which I didn’t discover until I’d been walking 10 minutes more.  The first bad location occurred when I typed the hotel’s name.  It picked a different venue which if I’d been wearing my glasses at the time I would have noticed right away.  The second bad location resulted when I typed the actual address into the search box and that address, according to Google, is not physically where the hotel really is—at least not on the street view where I live.  Also, Hunt Valley is not for pedestrians.  I needed to go out of my way to cross busy intersections, and even then, I had to beseech drivers who do not expect to see someone on foot to stop and let me cross with the light.  Fortunately, now I know how to make a beeline across several parking lots and can get back and forth in record time.  The upside: I know the area around the two hotels pretty well.

I got back to my hotel at around 5:50 and after depositing my conference goodie bag--which included, among other things, a (fullscreen) DVD of "Lassie" (2005) and 1987 reprint of the classic Hardy Boys' first adventure, "The Tower Treasure" (1927)--I went down to the lobby for a free dinner.  Most Residence Inns have manager specials early in the week, and this was no exception.  I made myself a chicken sandwich with lots of trimmings and drank a beer.  I took the sandwich back to the room and put it in a baggie.  I’ll have it for dinner tomorrow.  For dinner tonight, I had the leftover half of a Subway chicken sandwich that I had bought for lunch.

After finishing my meal, I called LodgeNet tech support around 6:15.  After waiting about ten minutes and then being disconnected, I got through the second time after a five minute wait and before the guy on the other end could ask me any questions, I gave him the ticket number and asked to speak to someone in tier two. After waiting on hold for another five minutes, tier two told me they are aware of the problem but can’t give me a time to resolution.  I asked them to call me once they fix the problem and they said they’d call the front desk.  I (once again) asked them to call me when they fix the problem and they said they would.  Right.

I decided to blog out my experience, and I barely got started when the problem was fixed.  This happened at 7:05pm.  I know the Dropbox icon popped up a box saying it was sync’ing files.  About a minute later, Xmarks began sync’ing bookmarks.  Between these two events, I was able to browse to the Gmail site and, better still, log in.  I wondered when they would call me to tell me everything’s working.  They did.  At 7:45pm I got the call.  I thanked the woman and said the problem looks to have been fixed about 40 minutes earlier and was told tech support wanted to make absolutely sure that things were working before calling me.  I asked what the problem was.  She said it had something to do with one of their servers.  I didn't press the issue.  My (low) expectations were exceeded when they called me.  Now I can stop blogging and get to work.