Blog-on-the-road, Part 2

Belts and suspenders: After the usual jetlag-disjointed night's sleep, I drag myself down for a very half-hearted workout in the hotel's modest fitness room. The exercise is much-needed, and not nearly as exhausting as trying to find something edible in the breakfast offerings. I make do.

I get to the client site and am all set up, but there seems to be no way to hook up my laptop. "Let's load the presentation onto the training room's computer," suggests one person. I whip out the CD-ROM with all the material. But there is no CD-ROM drive. I whip out my disk-on-key (jump drive), and voila! In just a moment, we're in business. It is the classic case of the prepared road warrior having belts, suspenders, and an emergency sewing kit.

The session participants are a cheery group; they don't object to the odd grammar joke, and they certainly appreciate the Israeli chocolates I toss. After an eight-hour training session, I have just time to get back to the hotel and change before heading out with one of the participants for an impromptu dinner meeting. We eat astonishingly bad Japanese food and discuss documentation and the use of y'all as a socially-acceptable pronoun.

The weatherman is predicting a cold front moving in on Wednesday morning, just when I am due to fly out. I would love to miss the snow.

Meanwhile, I wave to Olmert on TV and cringe as the perky young thing reading the news refers to him as "EE-hud AL-mert." Even worse, the news about Hamas's new-found willingness for peace talks is read to the backdrop of random images of Palestinian and Israeli battles. No explanation, no context. It was as if a story about a senator from Kentucky, with no better archive footage available, causes the newsroom to run images from the previous Kentucky Derby. Huh?! In the same broadcast, the reader misspeaks several times, clearly not understanding most of what she reads. It is depressing.