Author: Al
Posted: 2007-09-13 18:33:08
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One Jolly Folly After Another
Lance's recent post on my trip to England five years ago has brought on a flood of emotion and memory. This trip had a big impact on my life. It was the first time that I seriously looked at alcohol as a way to escape a bad situation. It taught me that corporations suck. To this day, my wife refers to the trip as my “Honeymoon with Lance.” It introduced me to my favorite single malt. And, most importantly, it has given my entertainment value at parties a much needed bost.
The funny thing about Lance's article is that it is unnecessarily kind to me. I will not have such reservations. Unfortunately I did not start writing this as soon as I got back from England, so the details and conversations all have an implied paraphrase and ambiguity to them. In a sense, I am grateful for this though, because the dreamlike surrealism adds a Man Who Was Thursday type of nightmarish flare that is more befitting of the experience than reality would be anyhow.
The Assignment
I was happily working away in our office lab in mid November when my boss's boss came in and asked to chat. “Great.” I thought, I'm the next one to get laid off. I sat down in his office and the conversation when something like this:
Scott: So Al, what does your month of December look like.
A very nervous Al: Umm... Well there's Christmas and all.
Scott: Well, we want you to go to England next month.
My mind instantly went to Mike. He was part of our group as recently as last month. He had been given a travel assignment and was laid off shortly after expressing reservations about going.
Al: Umm... what day... exactly?
Scott: The second.
Al: Could I possibly wait until the third?
The second was my anniversary, and I did not want to die in a fiery plane crash on my wedding anniversary. Perhaps I am part Lutheran, because every time I have to travel, I assume that I will die in a plane crash.
Scott: I don't see why not.
Al: Well, could I bring my wife and kid?
Scott: You're welcome to pay their way if you want, but the company cannot bring them.
Al: It's a month though... the month of DECEMBER.
Actually, that's only what I screamed in my head. My actual response was a dejected “OK.” I broke the news to my wife, and we resigned ourselves to spending the month apart. I asked several more times that November to please be allowed to bring her. I couldn't afford the $800 or so it would cost, but I would make up the differences in hotel costs. "No" was the repeated and more forceful answer each time.
The Trip
On the morning of the third, I said goodbye to my wife and son. My in-laws had come to town the night before, and would be taking them back to their place to await my arrival just in time for Christmas, assuming that I did not burn to death over the Atlantic. I felt much better knowing that Nik would have the company of her folks while I was away. Neither of us are terribly self sufficient without each other to this day, but five years ago, we could barely function apart and this trip was going to be brutally lonely for everyone involved.
The Boise airport was rather uncrowded. Lance had flown out on the first Monday after Thanksgiving. I had the fortune to wait until the next day. I had my ancient Lappy 486 and a five inch thick stack of documentation to keep me company over the next twenty-five hours. That isn't to say that I actually looked at either of them. They just kept me company.
I flew out on a Horizon prop-plane. I picked Horizon at Murdock's recommendation because hey “They give you free beer.” I had only been twenty-one for six months at this point and I hadn't actually had a beer since high school, but somehow the machismo of picking Horizon for the beer made me feel like a man. The captain announced that they had a special winter beer listed in the magazine. I thumbed through it and saw it was a wassail. Sure, what the heck.
Al: I'll have the Full Sail Wassail.
Stewardess: The what?
Al: You know... the beer.
Stewardess: It's Red Hook Winterhook, and you have to be twenty-one.
Al: Oh, and I am
I presented my ID and surprised everyone among the staff by actually being a tad over twenty-one. I got my glass of beer. It tasted kind of like a cross between a skunk and a live 120 volt electrical outlet. I managed to choke it down though because the task kept my mind off of the flight itself. This was my first flight since a very terrible experience going from New Orleans to Boise two years earlier, and I was quite nervous even thought the flight was very smooth.
That taste, however, stayed with me for the duration of my trip to England. The airline food that I had for the long haul from SeaTac to Heathrow did not stifle it in the slightest. Little did I know, the pipe organ was playing ominous foreshadowing music of my adventures in alcohol that were to plague us for the rest of the trip.
Another ominous bit of foreshadowing that I experienced was at the Leeds airport. When departing the plane, the line separated into Brits and Non-Brits. We went through separate corridors and arrived on the other side in the same order. Neither corridor did anything special, we were just segregated for segregations sake. It was a beautiful introduction to England's class system which would plague us intermittently for the remainder of the trip.
I could not rent a car in England (nor in most places in the US) because of my age, so without Lance as my chauffeur, I hailed a cab and doled out 50 GBP for the ride to the hotel in York.
Lance
It serves the purpose of this misadventure to describe my thoughts on Lance up until this trip. Our friendship formed, for me anyway, when he did what starts all of my meaningful friendships. He caught an obscure reference that I made. One day he asked where the aforementioned Mike was and my response was a parody of Coily the Spring Sprite “No Mike.”
I'm not sure why I seek bonds with other people through such means, but it is safe to say that if Nik's favorite Muppet had not been Grover, my would would be a very different and sad thing right now.
At any rate, at this point, Lance hovers somewhere in the nether region between acquaintance and friend. That is about as close as I get to anyone that I work with. He likes theology, sci-fi, and anime so we should have plenty to talk about if necessary, but I'm headed into this with a giant chip on my shoulder so I probably should just not associate with anyone.
I was really an insufferable jerk at this point in my life (I'm only a little better now), so it speaks to either his character or our desperation that he would even associate with me during the trip. I was an odd creature. Part college kid (though I had dropped out more than a year previous), part blue collar, and part pretentious ass.
Over the course of this trip, somewhere around downtown York, Lance became a friend.
Work
The work environment over there was something like a cross between Dante and Dali. In the basement where I worked, no one had even cubicles, we just set up our laptops and equipment on long tables. The room was divided between Canadians, South-Africans, Brits, and me.
The project I was on was a whopping three months behind, and yet every Friday at one, the Brits would, in unison, stand up and leave. We foreigners looked on in awe. We are away from our homes and families working seventy hours a week and you guys put in thirty-six on the dot. Nice. Still, I was hourly, and if I had to be in England without my family, work often beat any alternative.
My arch nemesis in England was a man named Paul. He was in charge of the i/o schedule (shed yule). This is often the first thing done on a project and simply involves mapping out what inputs and outputs are required of a project. You look at a schematic and scan it for things to measure and control. The average raisin can do one for a large project in a week. We were three months in and Paul was not quite done yet.
To be fair, Paul did finish it while I was there. He finished it every other day. I would get the completed schedule, take twenty minutes to notice a significant flaw, verify it with my lead, and give it back to Paul.
Near the end of this trip Brendan, my lead, who was a polite, near brilliant, hard working fellow from South Africa had this conversation with me.
Brendan: Look, I know you want to be nice to Paul but this shite, pardon my language, has got to stop, go tell him to fix these buggered up things or get the hell out of the office.
Al: I can't do that.
Brendan with an audible sigh of frustration: Give me a moment then.
He and Paul went into a side office and thereafter Paul could not look me in the eye. I do not know exactly what was said to him, but the next shed-yule I got was the last one. I would later find out that it changed again on the person who took the project over after my departure. I guess you can't scare complete competence into anyone.
That was my routine for nearly three weeks. Work, find a glaring error, beg for a fix, undo the previous work, repeat. So Lance misspoke when he said that I could have done my job from Boise. In fact, I was there for the arduous task of babysitting a man twice my age.
The Jarvis
The first hotel we tried out was the Jarvis. This was perhaps the most crucial mistake we made during the entire trip. The Jarvis was a good distance into the city, down narrow, winding, English streets filled with cars parked along both sides. It took thirty to forty-five minutes each morning to get out of town. This combined with the no-earlier-than-7:15-pastry-wrapped-bacon breakfast meant that we were quite late to lunch every bloody day we stayed there.
On the second morning at the Jarvis I looked at the bacon with despair. I could pick it out of the pastry and choke it down, or I could find something else. I don't know what Wheatabix is, but I'm damn sure not eating it. Oh look! Natural flavored yogurt. My poor two-watt, jet-lagged brain somehow crossed the wires for “Natural” and “Vanilla.” If you have never experienced natural yogurt before then you cannot appreciate my horror. No sugar. No flavoring. Just bacteria and dairy. Sweet mother that stuff was bad. Dejected, I proceeded to grab a handful of “bacon-pastry” and unwrap the chewy overcooked meat from its greasy, frail sarcophagus.
Any traveler knows that if you are staying in a hotel, bring your own soap and shampoo. I did this for my trip to England. Unfortunately I had the sheer gall of leaving said items in the bathroom on my first morning in the Jarvis. The kind and courteous hotel staff properly disposed of them for me. For the remainder of my trip, I spent every morning in the uncomfortable film of soap that the hotel variety leaves with you after a shower.
The Ambassador
This hotel introduced us to a miracle of medieval science. Load-bearing carpet. At the time of the trip, I weighed in at a hefty 270 pounds, perhaps more. Lance is a very thin guy, and so the hotel staff took it upon themselves to give me the room on the top floor because I obviously needed the exercise. I'm fairly good with intuitively knowing about materials and their tolerances. I understand spatial relations pretty well as all guys should. So I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the only thing keeping me from falling through the floor at that place was the carpet. The floorboards gave way easily under my feet, and the movement only stopped when the carpet stretched taught. I could hear the support beams in the walls strain as I walked by.
I had survived the plane trip, innumerable chances to kill or be killed on the motorways of England and Scotland. Falling through the floor of a dilapidated hotel was now a very real possibility for my death. I walked close behind my escort. If I was going to fall through, then by God I was taking someone with me. When morning came, we resolved that we would insure my fate not be sealed in the Ambassador. Our first night would be our last there.
The Marriott
Lance did a great job of describing the York Marriott. The only thing I feel compelled to add is that to this day I have never come more infinitesimally close to hitting a woman than I did in that snobbish restaurant.
All in all, that hotel did keep us sane. Sure, it was only a thin veneer of western comfort slapped over the top of Fawlty Towers, but that was a vast and welcome improvement over the other two York hotels.
The Novotell
After working for half the day on Saturday, I decided to call it quits after finding another missed section on the I/O shed-yule that would require a fix from Paul. Time to go find Lance at the Novotell. I had my trusty map from map quest, and the car that I wasn't supposed to drive. Sounds like a simple task. After an hour and a half of driving in and around that section of York, I was in the parking lot. Lance later confirmed that he had suspicions that I wouldn't find the place. Thanks for the heads-up buddy. I ordered prawns and steak from room service for dinner. After one prawn and less than half the steak Lance and I went out to find pub fare. You know that things are bad when pub food wins over already ordered steak and seafood.
The Bathrooms
If you live in America, I want you to get down on your knees right now and thank God Almighty for American restrooms. I am not toying with you or being facetious. Do it.
I am surprised that the English figured out the secrets to the wheel before discovering the Jet Engine. They have cars and electricity, and all sorts of modern niceties, yet they are a good two centuries behind in bathroom faucet design. Go and marvel at your faucet. See how you have two handles. One for hot. One for cold. See how you have one faucet where a miraculous blend of desired temperature water flows freely onto your hands. Our friends across the pond do not know such luxuries.
They have, I kid you not, two faucets for one sink. One faucet spits out water at around one half degree above freezing, while the other spits it out at one half degree below boiling. A typical attempt to wash your hands involves giving yourself second degree burns then cooling them off as quickly as possible. “Ouch. Brrr. Ouch. Brrr.”
Now, our trip through the unmentionable has only just begun. You must now go and find a relatively busy public restroom at which to marvel. Take in its austere beauty. Notice the wonderful dividing walls between urinals. Astound at the comfort of how no one, under any circumstance, makes eye contact with anyone else using the facilities. Everyone behaves the way God intended in an American restroom. We go out of our way to make sure that everyone else knows that we're completely uninterested in whatever activity anyone else is doing.
No one, unless absolutely necessary, will sit in the stall next to you. Always is the maximum distance achievable from every other occupied stall calculated. Never will someone sit right next to you and practice their unique male water buffalo mating call when there are a dozen other empty stalls on the other side of the room.
Dear friends, those poor bastards in England do not enjoy any of these privileges. Go to bed tonight thankful that you are an American.
Scotland
Scotland was amazing. Crossing into it was more like crossing from Idaho to Oregon than one might think, but the dreary cloud that had been England seemed to vanish at the border. I vehemently support Scottish independence after having visited the two places. Scotland, you are better than your little brother to the south and do not deserve to be subjected to his authority.
Edinburgh was fun, even though we had to resort to “Dirk Gently” driving tactics once I made a wrong turn and took us into the city proper. It almost worked too except for the hotel that our target stopped at was booked for the night. Oh well, you can't win them all. Actually, we couldn't win any of them on this trip, but this was as close as had come thus far, so you can imagine the disappointment.
Oddly enough, a quarter of the city burned to the ground shortly after we left that night. We may have been spreading our luck around.
The Food
English food is just bad. That is a given. Best of luck to you to find something that is not either fried or boiled or both. I knew this before my trip, but that really doesn't help with the harsh realities of eating the stuff every single day for weeks at a time.
I wasn't a beer drinker at the time, and thus had no idea what I liked or did not like in beer. I eventually found a stout that was pretty awesome, but at nine percent ABV was more than I could handle. I left more glasses two thirds full of beer than I care to remember. Most of the time I just wanted a coke. Try ordering a coke in an English pub without getting a dirty look.
Television
Lance (on the phone): What are ya doing?
Al: Just discovering that Brittan's Funniest Home Videos are just as funny as America's Funnies Home Videos.
Lance: You saw that too! That was awful.
In a land where the only things on TV are Star Trek, The Simpsons, and a German dub of The A Team, I was lost. TV was as close a thing to a parent as I had growing up. Seeing her twisted and evil the way TV was in England put a deep scar on my psyche. I think that it was something like finding out your mother was a toothless crack-whore.
The true horror of British TV is that every so often, you'll be innocently watching a commercial and some naked guy will just run across the screen presenting his buttocks for your approval. That's not nice to do to me TV. In America TV gives you ample warning before doing something like that. Thank you America.
The Return
The trip home was a monumental horror. I waited in the plane for two hours at the gate while they took some guy and his luggage off the plane for “security reasons.” This made us late enough getting back to Seattle that I missed my connection back to Boise.
Nik: Hello?
Al: Hi honey... I'm in Seattle, but I missed my flight.
Nik: No!
Al: Yep... Gotta go see if I can make it in tonight or not.
It turns out that the way travel had booked my flight, they didn't know I had a connector to catch, so I was on my own. I could spend $100 or so to catch a cab and get a hotel for the night in Seattle, or I could spend $100 to get another flight. Easy choice.
Missed Opportunities
Over the years I've kicked myself repeatedly for the following things that never occurred to me in England. Either I wasn't thinking about them, or had no exposure to them before the trip.
I did nothing related to C.S. Lewis.
I did nothing related to G.K. Chesterton
I did nothing related to John Wesley
I did nothing related to George MacDonald
I didn't tour the Tadcaster Brewery. Taddy Porter is an amazing kind of awesome.
I did nothing related to the Beatles.
I did not buy a York Minster shot glass. People still don't believe me that they were for sale in the church.
Weep with me.
Epilogue
I went to England under fear of being laid off. Being hourly, I earned a lot of extra cash there though. It was enough that we finally made the purchase on a house we had been looking at a month later. Then within a few weeks of the purchase I was laid off with half a dozen other peers, and our second child was on the way. Turns out that was one of the best things that could have ever happened to me. Odd how life works out sometimes.
Without staying in Boise I wouldn't have the awesome job I have now. Without the burden of loosing the house, I doubt that we would have stayed in Boise (we were well into the negative when I got my new job several months later). And we wouldn't have had the house without having gone to England.
So thanks England, I owe you one. |
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