Back On The Road

Wow. I forgot what I missed so much above business travel. Leaving the house at 5:30 AM to make an 8:45 flight rocks! Packing your Chapstick in your suitcase. Waiting in line with my luggage, there was a couple of another nationality that will remain nameless right in front of me. Both smelled like they just ate multiple cloves of garlic for breakfast. In all seriousness, I didn't want to be within 10 yards of this couple, let alone 10 inches. Jesus. I pity the people that had to sit in front of them on the plane. The thing that still freaks me out about airports is how much people talk on cell phones while waiting for the plane. Did we as Americans lose the ability to sit quietly for 30-60 minutes? The woman beside me made at minimum 10 calls and typed furiously on her Blackberry. It's 7:30 AM!! Sit down, drink your coffee and watch CNN or read the paper. Damn! The flight was uneventful and I got my rental car fast. I'm sporting around in a Kia Optimus or something. I wanted the Mini Cooper but then I would have had to pay more. Interesting that the smaller car is more than an intermediate. Anyway, I got to my hotel thanks to my Razr phone's GPS and got settled in. What a place! The Peachtree Plaza Westin. Sweet. I'm on the 52nd floor looking down on the city right now. What a view. Nicest room I've ever had. It's a round floor and each room is a slice of pie with the outside wall being all window. The room even has a nice robe. Comfy! I might keep it. The vendor fair sucked as usual, but they had great food. I ate Cocconut Shrimp all night. I even pilfered some drinks from the bar so I didn't have to drink them from my mini-bar in the room. A can of soda is $2.50! There's a little bag of almonds in there that could be mine for $7.75. No shit. The airplane size alcohol is $7.00 per bottle. It's madness. Madness I tell you. I mean I want to stay in the nicest place possible.....but I wish the nicest places also had vending machines so you don't have to spend $3.00 for a Snickers bar (yup, right off the pricing sheet in the mini-bar. What's cool is looking out towards the airport. You can see the lights from the jets as they come in and out. After the fair ended I got to spend some time with an engineer for another Fiserv product called FIDO. It's an alert system that runs within the core processor for the CUs that is rules based and shoots out emails when something isn't right. It recently foiled a plot by a guy who was depositing large sums via fake checks at multiple branch locations and then started taking it out the next day. FIDO correctly picked the next location he would withdraw from and the police were there waiting for him. Cool stuff. Why isn't our software more sexy?