Travel blues

I travelled to Orlando on Sunday for a conference. It has been a while since I last flew on United. My current experiences have been on American or NorthWest. United does have nicer planes but I ran into some flight attendants that were having a bad day. They were rude, unhelpful and definitely not interested in making the journey as comfortable as possible for the passengers. Except for that the flight was uneventful.

I did have a few surprises though after I landed. First the Budget customer service person could not locate the key of the car assigned to me and had to assign me a different car. It is a Chevy Trailblazer. I have never driven it and I will never purchase it so it is nice to drive a big SUV for a change. And then after I reached the hotel, the front desk person told me that my reservation was done was February 19th and not March 19th. Thanks to fat-fingering by the Travel Desk at my company. But the staff at the hotel was somehow able to give me a room without any problems.

Now coming to the conference itself. It is quite interesting. I think it takes a lot of guts to stand in front of a thousand people and say - this is how the world will look like in 5 years. Some people do this extremely convincingly. I enjoyed nothing but one session where the presenter was very knowledgable and articulate. It is always a pleasure to listen to such people.

Conference and no fancy dinners, well that cannot happen. We had a team dinner tonight since there are 6-8 of us from my company at the conference. The dinner was at this fancy restaurant in the hotel. Food was nothing much to talk about but the ambience was great. Also, it was good to chat with some of my colleagues about a variety of topics in a relaxed environment.

As the day comes to an end, I look forward to another day of sessions at the conference tomorrow. It should be great as we will get to hear from some experts.

And lastly, India's cricket victory over Bermuda today does not in any way erase the fact that they played lousy and lost to Bangladesh. They will have to repeat this performance when they face Sri Lanka to help erase that loss.