New York in March. Brrrr.

After reading Janine’s post, I was compelled to blog about my own business trip. I’m taking an IVR programming class at Nortel in Bohemia, NY — at least that’s where the Nortel office is supposed to be located; technically, it’s in Ronkonkoma, but it’s much easier to pronounce Bohemia, so I’m sure that’s why they use that name instead. “Ronkonkoma” is actually pronounced ron-kon’-kÉ™-mÉ™, and not ron’-kon-koh’-mÉ™, as I heard someone say today.

Anyway, I flew in to Islip on February 28th for a two day class, followed by a full week from March 5th through the 9th. There were only 3 people, including me, in the first class. I found out on Friday that in the week-long programming class, there would only be myself and a co-worker from our Utah office. That was good news, because most of the time, there’s at least one person in a class that slows down the pace with way too many questions. Well, on Sunday night, I heard from my co-worker, who spent the weekend in the hospital and wouldn’t be coming to the week-long class. So it’s just me and the instructor.

The nice thing about being in a class by yourself (haha) is that you can work at your own pace without having to wait for other people to catch up (or to work faster to catch up, depending on how dumb you are slowly you work). The bad thing about being in a class by yourself is that you can work at your own pace, and that often means that you end up blowing through the course material much faster.

So today is Day 3 (Wednesday), and I got out of class 2 hours early because we’re already at the end of the Day 4 material. I haven’t been rushing — in fact, we’ve even taken time to do some experimentation with the class material; it’s just that this stuff is fairly easy, and without other people in the class asking questions, it just naturally moves more quickly.

So it looks like I may end up getting done on Thursday, which means I can try to find an alternate flight on Friday instead of Saturday.

The class has been interesting, and I’ve learned a lot, but it’s just not possible to slow down in order to pad out the material for an additional day or more.

As for New York, this area of Long Island is a lot like Raleigh in some ways. It’s flat, has plenty of trees, and not many tall buildings. It’s UNlike Raleigh in that there’s nothing to do around here. There’s an Applebee’s and a McDonalds across the street from the Hotel, but this stretch of road has very little else. I drove around over the weekend looking for something to do, but came up empty.

I considered taking the train into Manhattan on Saturday — and I regret not doing to, because it was the warmest day — but decided against it.

Like Janine, I also tend to put the Do-Not-Disturb sign on my door. I travel with a lot of electronics (laptop, old 4th generation iPod, PSP (comes in handy at the airport and on flights) and a portable media player for watching movies), and I have to leave this stuff in my hotel room while I’m in class, so I’d rather keep my room off-limits to hotel staff. I don’t actually think the cleaning staff would steal anything, but I’d just rather not take my chances. After only a couple of days of having the DND sign on the door, the cleaning people kept bugging me about needing towels. I don’t know about everybody else, but I don’t go through towels like they were napkins. Those things are reusable.

As far as I can tell, the hotel staff has not circumvented the DND sign, so all is well.

Anyhoo, I’m hoping I can get out of here early. Since I’ve been here, the warmest day saw temperatures in the high fifties, and that was a fluke. The last couple of days have been unseasonably cold, even for NY. Yesterday, the temperature didn’t get above 15, and the wind was blowing at 20-40 mph… the wind chill was in single digits. Today wasn’t quite as bad (less wind), but there’s about a half-inch deep dusting of snow on the ground. This is the kind of snow that’s so cold, it doesn’t melt or stick…it just blows around like dust. It makes some interesting patterns on the roadways, but other than that, it doesn’t really have much of an impact.

I miss the Raleigh weather almost as much as I miss Cary. Ok, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration.