Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

travelogue 7

travelogue 7
travelogue 7 by Tim Caynes

“you wanna have your 5 year old technology platform and migrate onto our content services architecture and keep all your functionality intact because your director likes the way that he can generate a report that nobody reads? yeah. ok, have a nice day! bye! it ain’t gonna happen” and “it’s about standard practices and technologies and even if we’re not 100% there, we’re 90% there which is what we can deliver now and, oh, by the way you ain’t ever gonna get that 10%, right? oh, you want 50% of that 10%? sorry. have a nice! bye!” and “you’re the business you should be telling us” and so on.

having spent the morning in the hotel room finishing off the 3 slides I spent until 3:04 am trying to finish last night this morning I made the mistake of uploading the finished presentations to the collabspace via the hotel broadband link which has an upstream capability of around 2 bytes an hour or something and so I spent 40 minutes just watching a logo twizzle round on the top corner of a browser until what is left of my hair was scattered liberally around a gideon bible having been dragged from my scalp through the unbearable tension of network stasis and a desperate urge to just jump out the window. but it did upload eventually and I made a tom cruise mission impossible type disconnect/unlink/snapshut laptop move and dashed out the room into the maid who was just putting something unsavoury into a yellow plastic bag that said ‘medical’ on it and down the elevator and slid manaically across the hood of the suzuki gelatin like starskey always used to do at the beginning of starskey and hutch, or was that hutch, no, he did that thing where he jumped off a wall and landed on his arse on the hood of a car. I had planned to meet up casually with some colleagues to break into the 4 days ahead, but now I was going to have to screech around Interlocken Everdecreasing Loop like an idiot, leg it up to the lobby of building 5 at which point I will pass out in a sweaty white heap because I always do at the lobby of building 5 and then I’ll get lost for 20 minutes looking for a meeting room called Yellowfoot Beaver Catastrophy or something which I will eventually find by walking past it 3 times while everybody inside wonders why I’m just walking past 3 times and so I’ll stumble through the door just as somebody is reaching a climax and it’ll take all my powers of being a stupid english person to ingratiate myself with a bunch of folks who have been in this room for an hour already and really would rather be writing taglibs or something.

“think of it as a utility subscription convergence services architecture model. if you can” and “so there are really 3 parts to it. no, 4. yes so there’s the, oh, hang on, 5 parts. 5? what’s the fifth part. I though we weren’t going to, oh, right. anyway, so, there’s 5 parts to the basic…what? right, I see. so, the basic 4 parts…” and “so, back to the presentation here, this is how I see our cascading delivery model for our service orientateted model thing which is what it really is, right?” and “aha, you see, that is correct, but I wish to understand how one should begin to test that which we have no means to determine whether the potential outcomes are dependent on the allocation of and development of and attribution to, per se, those suites to which we do not yet have developement schedules against those to whom the testing will be the test of the testing under which we should be managing the scope of the discussions here pertaining to that which is preventative but untested” etc. after 4 hours of that with the occasional “we’re all shareholders, right?” I was ready to turn my back on another day and discuss things like sausages and hummers over dinner instead and so retreated to the flex space at the end of the universe for a while, plugging and unplugging ethernet cables to nowhere for about 20 minutes until I got one that got me connected and my battery died, laughing.

travelogue 6

travelogue 6
travelogue 6 by Tim Caynes

I’m going to get back to the hotel far too early and I mght have to do more work than is necessary so I get the suzuki granola back on the right side of the road and head back to Broomfield the long way round even though the sun is kind of losing the will and the looming clouds are starting fights over the edge of the hills but I like the look of that little road and its got an old gas station on the corner and it looks like it might lead to an interesting kind of town where I can stop off at a grocery store and get 5 gallons more water because my internal organs are like walnuts by now and there I shall have a pleasant tourist conversation with a local park ranger with squirrels on his back or something like that. despite the rapidly darkening skies the short drive is just as I’d hoped with a beautiful view of rattlesnake gulch and shirttail peak and places with names like that spread out in front of me with suitably placed bumps in the road which are giving the shocks on the suzuki a bit of panning and they’re now crunching around which is a nice compliment to the grinding and grating noise the front nearside wheel has been making every time I put the brakes on since I left the airport and in a short while I’m approaching the outskirts of Eldorado Springs. well, I say outskirts but in fact by the the time I’ve entered, I’ve exited and all I can see now is large signs written in paint with a large brush which say things like DON’T PARK HERE IF YOUR NOT FROM THE COMM-U-NI-TY and NO PARKING HERE and PARK ENTRANCE NOT THIS WAY and I’m beginning to get the feel that there ain’t a friendly grocery store here and actually its a bit like the Witterings in the UK which are deserted in winter and you never see a human but in the summer is full of signs made out of industrial size letraset from B&Q and A4 card which say things like OH NO, YOU CAN’T PARK HERE and PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T PARK ACROSS DRIVEWAY and NO CHANGE FOR PARKING and GOLF SALE and suchlike and for 3 months the only road in and out of the village is nose to tail with vauxhall vectras, golf gtis and renault megane scenics spewing out carbon monoxide, churning up herbacious borders and generally metropolizing an area of outstanding natural beauty although the garage on the edge of town does a good trade in bottles of water and happy shopper sandwiches and ginsters at that time of year probably which I how I imagine Eldorado Springs must be between May and September on its one road in and out of town where enterprising locals set up stalls at the side of the road selling litres of water for 5 bucks and replacing the signs with ones which say PARKING HERE $20 ALL DAY and LAST PARKING BEFORE NATIONAL PARK and things.

that’s not to say it didn’t look like a nice place. it was just kind of closed and I wasn’t going to stay long enough to pay whatever is cost to park in the national park parking area so I swiveled the suzuki geronimo around in the dirt, dropping it onto the deck at least a couple of times when the wheels hit any particularly tasty potholes which resulted in a rather nice banging noise from under the passenger seat every time I turned left from then on, and I headed back towards Broomfield where my other presentation on globalization was on he tadpole mocking me into including a slide about engagement models and business requirements for a next generation ecommerce platform that can pop up storefronts in uzbekistahn at the flick of a switch but probably can’t take any money for some reason and might be in English anyway and so I get back on the 128 and hope that it eventually turns into a road that includes ‘Interlocken’ in its name because then I’ll know I’ll only have a couple of hours drivng insanely round in circles trying to get off any raods with ‘Interlocken’ in their name before I’ll be back at the renaissance and taking pictures out of the 7th floor window thinking that I might one day stick them all together as a panorama of a number of car parks, which will be nice.

approaching Broomfield by the back door it was apparent that the snow was waiting for me over the brow of Interlocken Endless Loop and so I stopped by the side of the road, pointed my camera at the sky, quickly ditching it and pretending to be on my upside-down callphone when the local police slowed down as they passed and then decided to brave the elements in a kind of head-on fashion. I got back to the hotel about 3 hours later, but not because of the snow. while I wasn’t looking, someone put a golf course in the way and I’d got to the 15th green before I realized I’d lost the plot.

barking at the flatiron crossing

denver was a last minute thing. before that, I’d planned for, ooh, a couple of hours, to go back to the flatiron crossing and visit those nice people in PacSun to see if they’d had a delivery of large tshirts with skatetractors on that I could get my hands on. I figured I could probably get all that stuff with ‘Colorado’ or ‘Boulder’ or ‘Flatiron’ printed on it while I was there as well and so I’d only have to take one evening out of the social calendar to visit the mall, eat alone at the Renaissance and actually get to bed before 2 am. so wednesday evening was dedicated to’ project taxable items’ and if I got away from the globalization meetings we had arranged that afternoon which I’d arranged myself but completely forgotten about and had left my UK/US travel adaptor behind and couldn’t plug in the laptop and had the wrong phone and it felt like the wrong head which I had found under a bucket, then I figured I’d probably have a couple of hours and anyway the flatiron’s pretty small except for the enormous empty department sotres at each end/corner/whatever where dirk and sarah are just kind of unloading ties and arranging them in a spiral on a shiny tabel in menswear, because they’ve run out of shoes to arrange and they haven’t actually sold anything for an hour.

so I extricate myself from broomfield 5, turn the wrong way onto interlocken loop, end up at the airfield where a couple of light aircraft spray the car with nerve gas or something and then I take a left and look back over the crest of the hill where broomfield sprawls out beneath me, and I can see foleys and nordstrum about a mile away and so I set off in a straight line, keeping them in my sights all the time. across parking lots, central reservations, golf courses, 4-ways, 3-ways, and anything else the rental fucos can negotiate and in 5 minutes I’ve slammed through a hedge into the empty parking lot and I’m wondering if the flatiron actually closes at 6pm on wednesdays, until I see a middle aged couple with a foleys bag fall through the doors and I realize that I’ve jumped the first hurdle and at least I’m at the mall and its open. I stick the dead laptop in the boot/trunk lock my wallet in the car and set off on my pathetic little quest.

cookie smell. its there. good. right. being a veteran of the flatiron having been here once before, I know where I’m headed and stride confidently through foleys, which looks like the kind of place I might come back to one day when I’ve passed 60, lost all my money to online poker and have lost all self respect and have the sartorial elegance of a pig farmer on vacation, and then the world opens up and I’m into main street, or the village, or ‘flatiron street’, or whatever they’ve called the main drag in the mall which in the UK would have actually been a regular street for 800 years but now it’s got a marble tiled floor and an atrium roof and smells of cookies, but I suspect over here in Colorado used to be, well, probably nothing at all but a maybe a place where some animals roamed around or something athough I’m sure that’s completely inaccurate and actually it was a street for 300 years, but a street that had animals roaming all over it, and I know that I should take a left out of foleys, but there’s only straight on as an option, so I’m confused already. oh, but wait, I’ve come out 20 yards from PacSun, it’s just over there. bingo. I’ll be out of here in 20 minutes and then I can get a game sausage and pasta entree in flatz and spend 4 hours reading email and watching drew barrymore in some family channel film about bad love and driving cars up mountains blindfold etc.. brilliant.

‘hi there!’ oh dear. looks like I’m this evening’s customer. don’t they know I’m british? surely they can tell I’m not used to being communicated to in stores unless I’m complaining about christmas lights being put up too early or the rudeness of the staff. ‘my name is christy and i’ll be your server today. rashid is with us in mens today so if you have any questions today, then please today let me know and we’ll see how we can help today sir. is there anything I can help you with today?’ dammit. I was hoping to slip in quietly, pick a couple of tshirts that would be perfect for a 16-year old son but that I’m actually buying for my 38-year old self, bag them and slip away before anyone had noticed. they probably remember me from 6 months ago when I did the same thing. they’ve been brainwashed or something and they have some kind of sinister ESP that they use to gang up on shoppers and make them buy stuff they didn’t want. ‘er, no, i’m just, er, looking’. ‘ok sir, well, give me a holler if you’re needing anything, sizes or styles, ok?’. ‘right, sure’. a holler? what’s that? sure, I’ll give you a holler. I’ll find a tshirt that looks about right and I’ll come up to the counter and shout in your face I THINK I’LL TAKE THIS ONE BUT HAVE YOU GOT IT IN A LARGE, CHRISTY? I’m not sure about this at all. and they haven’t got any tshirts I like, even though rashid pulled a couple down from the ceiling with a huge stick, in case I ‘wanted to check the style’ of them. exit strategy. head down. move to the door, stealthy. nearly there. ‘YOU HAVE A GREAT DAY TODAY SIR’. jesus, she doesn’t have to shout at me on the way out the door, I mean, I was the only person in there. ‘YOU’VE A GREAT EVENING SIR YOU SEE US AGAIN SOON’. oh no, rashid has barked out to me as well. I’m nearly out the door. do I acknowledge them or something? I’m too far out to speak normally, and I can’t turn around without that looking just really awkward. maybe I’ll just ignore them. no, can’t ignore them, that’s just rude. dammit!

in the end, I just kind of weakly raised my hand and gave a kind of backwards wave with my knuckles while pulling a half smile that was only seen by a couple of teenage girls pulling gum out in strings who probably immediately classified me as a danger to the public. so that wasn’t quite how I’d seen this evening going. now I’ll have to do the walk along the ground floor and back along the upper floor because I’ve crossed the invisible threshold which means I’m too far in to simply turn around and walk out and I can’t just stop in the middle and decide it’s all over by looking at my watch and pretending I’m late for a meeting or something even though I appear to be the only person in the mall, which of course, is worse, because that means everybody is looking at me wondering what the hell I’m doing gibbering to myself in the doorway of PacSun waving my limp wrist about with a sickly insipid half-grin on my face. oh well. let’s get it over with. I might find something in the ‘mid thirties man trying to be 18 through inappropriate dressing in guess, stussy and levis’ section in nordstrum where I can have chat with dirk about whether I’m here on business and whether he’ll accept maestro cards or if I’ll have to put it on visa and I’ll wonder why he doesn’t take a pin number or a signature and I’ll go home alone as they pack up the rest of the ties until tomorrow when they’ll finish the spirals and start of the glove trees for christmas. except I don’t. I didn’t find anything anywhere. 40 minutes of my life has passed by in this place and I’m no closer to a purchase than I was during my globalization presentation on monday, where at least I got pizza and donuts. I’ve even been into crate and barrel and considered getting a set of kitchen knives for the hell of it, but homeland security or the tsa might have something to say about that. I know. I’ll just leave. go back to hotel without buying anything. perhaps I’ll go to denver on friday or something (which I do). so, where was the fucos? that’s right, back though the power tools in foleys. right, let’s go.

I was almost at the entrance to foleys when I took a quick look to my left for some reason. just baskets and things. but hang on, there’s something moving in that one. what is this place? oh. I see. aaaaaaaaaaaaah. it’s a pet shop. not the kind of pet shop you get in the UK which might have a fish and a couple of tired guinea pigs hiding under a shredded free advertiser. no it’s more like the ones in spain that the kids stick their nose up against. the kind of pet shop that has, well, pets in. I’m talking dogs. and cats. and big spiders and lizards and rats and gerbils and geckos and frogs and things that look like sticks that are probably insects, but actually, are just sticks in a spider case without a spider in it. there must of been about 12 glass-sided cases, each with a couple or three puppies in. and these weren’t just your average mixed up breeds of dogs, they were all those wierd ones you only ever see people walking around with under their arms plus a few which would eventually be about 10 feet tall and need their own house. and they were all barking. yapping, to be more accurate. little whiny puppy yaps that were somewhere in between very cute and instant migrane. in the top-right case, was the most striking dog of the lot. it was a white husky puppy which cost about a million dollars and was just kind of slinking about, outstaring everyone that came into the shop. I gave it a go, but after about 5 minutes I had to rush to the bathroom to pour water into my dried-up eyeballs. that dog had the most evil stare. and I swear it had human eyes. I mean, they didn’t look like dog eyes at all, they were bright green, piercing, human eyes, I’m sure of it. there was something strange going on in the back of the store. nevertheless, I stayed for about 30 minutes just watching puppies roll over on metal grills and biting each other’s ears off and I think every customer in the flatiron passed through in that time and stood there going aaaaaah and stuff, so maybe it was just a really nice shop that happened to have a devil husky in one case by mistake and I was reading too much into the little yelping and squelching noises coming from the backroom.

I went for a grilled beef skewered bar meal in the end and watched the bullets on cable in the bar with a couple of flat tires before retiring to the 6th floor and charging up the laptop before falling asleep in front of the scifi channel which had something on which looked like star wars but wasn’t.

twitching in the flatiron crossing

Nordstrom, Foleys, Nordstom, Foleys, erm, left. No, straight on. will they have socks? of course they will. they’ll have those thin old man socks that cost $15 dollars and have diamonds up the side. right then, Foleys. Left. No, hang on, I can get presents in Nordstrum too. right, Nordstrum it is. ok, left. I think, hang on, ALRIGHT MATE! I’M THINKING!

stick the ceramic aztec trophy in the boot and swish through the doors, straight into Chan in menswear. “is there anything I can help you with today sir?” erm, no thankyou, I’m just being british and stalking around your footwear in a deliberate fashion while hunting for socks I refuse to ask you to locate for me. these shops are always empty when I go in them. I mean, Nordstrom. it’s huge, but there’s absolutely noone in here. is that just me? anyway, I don’t find socks, but upon realizing that flatiron crossing isn’t just 2 huge department stores stuck together in the middle, I head off into the wilderness of thursday evening mall shopping in Colorado. I need a tshirt. I have to fly back tomorrow in a tshirt that was fine when I flew out a week ago but following numerous bar meals in the tap room, with fat tire, slabs of hotel chocolate, lunchtime sushi, nachos, burgers, subways, beer, enchiladas, tubs of lard etc., my uber gut stretches the etnies logo out of shape and I look like I should be sat in a golf cart in florida with a havana in one hand and a colostomy bag in the other. so I just need to scale up slightly for the plane. it’s the altitude you see, it adds 20 pounds because of the air pressure or something, honest. right, banana republic. nope. helly hansen. yeah, right, I really need microfibres that stretch to fit and expose every contour. gap. nope. dick’s sporting goods. ooh, maybe, lets have a look. eh? there’s people wall climbing in here. that’s just stupid, get me out of here. hang on, they’re playing the carpet crawlers by genesis in a sports store in a broomfield mall in 2005. that’s just weird. mind you, I hang on for a couple more minutes to listen and pretend to look at basketballs I’ve no intention of buying. “you gotta get in in to get ou-ou-ou-ooou-out”. nope. abercrombie and fitch. it’s too dark in there. and a man just came out with a sideways head, I don’t like the look of that. pacific sunwear. sorry, Pac Sun. sounds a bit like Pac Man that martin has in his basement. ok, there’s 21 year olds in there I aspire to be like and I desperately want to wear their tshirts and be in their gang, so I’ll take a look, even though I’ve come straight from BRM01 and I’m wearing my meeting clothes so obviously I just look like their dad. or creepy trying-to-be-trendy uncle or something. ah so what. right, over to the shirt rack. ooh, fox, etnies, hurley, mad monkey, wet dog, quiksilver, billabong, rolf harris, and they’re 3 for 2. I have to try one on, because I still don’t know whether a US medium is a UK large or whether that’s just random. “Hi I’m Sara! I’ll be unlocking your changing room door for you today and closing it behind you! If you have any questions in Pacific Sunwear today, please give me a shout!”. er, ok. in the end, medium is medium, and I really need a fat git size today, so large it is. $42 dollars and a withering smile from me that says please let me be in your gang later and I’m out of there.

still no socks though. but now I have a shopping bag with stuff I’ve bought in it. that makes me a shopper. that means I can browse around other shops and for some reason staff completely ignore me, like I’ve been seduced by the dark side and they don’t need to pursuade me to part with my money. I’ve crossed the line. I will spend more, it’s the law. so with me bulging comfort blanket in me right hand and me left hand in my trouser pocket, I head back to victorias secret which I passed by earlier but pretended not to be interested in, even saying something like “ah yes, brookstone” out loud to myself so people thought I was intent on going somewhere else. I can now cross the threshold of this place as a shopper, which means I’m not just gawping at plunge bras like a 15 year old, I might actually buy one as well. for my wife. but actually, victorias secret is just so rampant it all gets too much for me and after doing one circuit, humming to myself apparently nonchalently, I try to stumble out gracefully, but I trip over the electronic tag detector in the doorway and set off the alarm with the magnetic strip on my library card. I think I just about hold it together while I crawl around the floor, picking up the contents of my wallet as it slithers away from me across the polished floor and me glasses fall out of my shirt pocket, where I’ve been keeping them like some professor or something. stand up. shoulders back. walk on. smile. try not to notice the entire staff in there are peering at you around the counter and the stock cupboard door like you’re some kind of pantomime freak on holiday who left his costume on. never mind that they’re all 19 and called Kirsty and they would have been happy to help you if you had any questions in victorias secret today, it’s too late. you’re an idiot. a fat idiot who hasn’t bought any presents and looks like a stupid dad person on vacation, looking for socks and loitering around lingerie shops.

anyway, I did get some socks. calvin klein, $10 each. then I went back to the hotel and sat in the bar on my own watching tv. I’m going to drive to Aspen tomorrow.

wake up dammit

19 hours of travelling and I’m sat in front a tv that’s 5 feet off the ground trying to focus on re-runs of CSI or something that’s got loads of earnest looking americans picking up suspicious objects from the floor of smoky warehouses in slowmotion and then cross fading to a train that goes over your head like what it does in the French Connection until some words or other slide into the frame and then just as I get it the adverts cut in and there’s a massive Nissan Globalwarmer driving across a desert with a boat in the back of it and a caption comes up at the bottom saying ‘professional driver in a simulated desert thats not real so dont do this at home in wisconsin because itll be all your fault when the chassis falls to bits and a flying camshaft takes out Mrs. Pantiles at number 47’. I must be dead in Colorado.

7 years ago all this was fields, well, probably a golf course, but now it’s full of hotels that you can see from 17 miles away but apparently I can’t find the entrance to without driving the wrong way up highway 36 and then taking a turning onto Interlocken and then realizing every turning here is called Interlocken so I’m no closer to my bed than I was 18 hours ago when I got out of it at 7 in the morning and said goodbye to my family like it was a trip across antartica but they actually were still asleep and just kind of said ‘yeah, er, bye’. in between then and now, which seems like about 5 fat tires and 2 bar meals in the tap room talking to Brad about cutting your thumb and listening to Tom going on about wine which is just a bit warm, but definitely not corked, I managed to squeeze in a bus a plane and a chevy cheapskate. oh, and a taxi to the bus station, where Ron dropped me off as we saw a couple kissing each other goodbye and he said ‘youre not getting one of those mate!’ and he was right, even if I offered him double the fare. I usually stay in a rubbish hotel in the heathrow flight path the night before flying out, well its practically on the runway, just at the point where they dump 10 hours worth waste over berkshire, but the flight to denver leaves at 15:50, so rather than taking 2 weekends out I decided to take the bus in the morning to the airport, because the bus isn’t that bad really. unless it’s sunday morning at 7 oclock and the driver has obviously just had a row about eggs with his wife and will happily call the IT specialist an ‘arsehole’ who just put his bag in the luggage compartment marked in his head as ‘gatwick’ instead of the secret one called ‘heathrow’. that was the longest 4 hour bus journey ever. so I get to heathrow about 4 hours before I need to and because I’ve checked in online, I can’t check in yet and so I have to sit in the pre-departures ‘seating area’ which is like finding a dry piece of newspaper to sit on at glastonbury – funny for 2 seconds. 2 hours later I can check in, but that’s alright, because my online check-in means I ‘beat the queues’. apart from the queue that is everybody who has checked in online for British Airways, which is the longest queue of all queues in this collection of queues that is a check in area at heathrow airport.

anyway, as Patricia says, BA’s service onboard is impeccable, even thought the 777 I’m sat in is pants compared to a 747-400 and I’m damned if I can work out when Hotel Rwanda is going to start, so I end up watching Hide and Seek instead which has that 6th sense twist that you kick yourself for not seeing an hour before and then de niro goes all cape fear/tribble, which just isn’t so good at 60, especially when you can see him in Meet the Fockers on channel 16 on the screen on the seat next door. kind of takes the tension out of it when he’s simultaneously wielding a blood-spattered spade and rescuing a toy dog from a toilet . still, dakota fanning was a great dark-haired miseryguts. I managed to squeeze in another film I’ve already completely forgotten about before we landed and no sooner had I stepped off the Avis shuttle bus than I realized I probably couldn’t find my way out of airport in the chevy preferredaccount without at least breathing some real air. I stopped for a while in the car lot and remembered that last time I came here with Chris, Air Force 1 was just landing and we watched it taxi up to the gate where will smith and tommy lee jones appeared from a range rover and we got whisked away to the marriot in Boulder.

having eventually negotiated InterlockenEverywhere I was checked into the Omni and there I sat on the end of the the bed, after a couple of swift ones in the tap room talking with a nice woman from StorageTek about Malcolm Glazer and bikes, flicking through the interactive services menu to see if the bar bill was already on my online statement which it wasn’t which I though was interesting but actually soon realized that just meant I should go to bed and stop being so sad. for some reason I woke up on the hour, every hour, until it was time to get up again. I can’t explain that, but I’ll probably not try and program the radio alarm clock and the p800 and the tv and wake up service all at the same time tonight.

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