IMR: Entries: 2001: October: 16 — Tuesday, October 16, 2001

Great Start My first morning here was a rough one. And I knew how the day was going to go before I even opened my eyes.   The view out my window in daylight. The Chinese do love their bicycles. Our shiny hotel lobby, three months old. Computers in our home away from home. Where'd these pillars come from? The view from the top floor is even better. The Grand Hyatt and the Pearl Tower. The moment I woke up at 5 a.m., I knew I was in trouble. I couldn't lift my head, and I felt as if my ears were giving off steam, my kneecaps were nailed into place, and a fat gerbil was gnawing at a tender spot of brain behind my forehead. In retrospect, it was clearly some Chinese flavor of the 24 hour flu (the guy next to me on the flight from Tokyo kept coughing in my general direction), but my ickiness was so thick and tangible I couldn't help but wonder if it was something else. I do regularly wake up, after all, to the soothing strains of CNN. Topping the world news was the U.S. anthrax scare (three cities at the time), and back home the headlines were all about a dengue fever outbreak. "That would just figure," I gurgled aloud as I finally got out of bed by rolling off the side. My head was throbbing like a hammered toe, and every muscle ached. I literally stumbled badly to the shower to try and steam some sense into my body. I realized after a while that jet lag, hunger, and dehydration played a part in my first impression of the day, but it didn't make me look any more forward to work. I glanced out the window, and did a double take. In daylight, I realized that our hotel was located in the middle of a huge developed area, mostly low-rise residential structures but within blocks of a core of high-rise office buildings. It looked completely different than it did at night, when it was nearly pitch black. Indeed, when we first arrived, I wondered if our hotel was in the middle of a corn field. As bustling a city as Shanghai is during the day, I guess they turn all the lights out at night. I got dressed, slowly, and shuffled stiffly down to the lobby to meet everyone for breakfast. I was squinting at everything, and almost hated myself for looking visibly miserable. I wanted to assure folks it wasn't melodrama, really — I really did feel like shit. I forced myself to eat, buttered toast and plain corn flakes, and three glasses of orange juice. Getting calories into my system helped. I went back for more food and filled my tummy with lots of bacon and a ham-and-mushroom omlette. Another bowl of cereal. And the day's high-point: miso soup. For the rest of the day, I felt like I was operating at maybe 30 percent. The rest of said day was finalizing arrangements with the hotel. We had the big pre-con meeting with key hotel staff (I suspect only three out of twelve even understood what we were saying), then toured all the venues. And that's where the fun started. Pillars. We got maps of all the meeting rooms from the hotel, and had submitted to them meticulous drawings of the room setup — rounds of ten, hollow-square, the whole range. And when we started, things were exactly as expected. But then we stopped in the room that would become our office, our home away from home, and I only faintly noted that there was a pillar in the room, a bit off to the side, but it didn't matter because of the way we had set up the tables. The next room was the killer. Right down the center of the room were two very large, clearly load-bearing refrigerator-sized pillars. Because of their presence, the hollow-square we'd asked for ended up a hollow rillylong rectangle, squeezed along only one side of the room — leaving the other half useless and giving us only part of the number of seats we needed. "Okay, see, this is not going to work," Sylvia said, in that way only she can. There began a whirlwind tour of every other function room in the hotel (many sporting other oddly-placed pillers that were not on the maps), from the Presidential Suite to the Italian restaurant. Nothing else was going to work. (I don't know why, but I thought immediately of the Ala Moana Hotel, another structure where the engineer and the architect were clearly not talking to each other — it sports one ballroom with a water-tank-sized pillar dead center. No one uses it.) We ended up back in the original room, but rotated the square 90 degrees and made the pillars part of the design. Some folks would have only half-room views, but... it beat the restaurant "party room." Apart from that, I busied myself with my primary responsibility — equipment. I scrambled to get our cellular phones, and touched bases with the much-abused vendor who was supplying our computers, copiers, and other goodies. We all worked straight through the day, skipping lunch completely. I was also coordinating agenda updates, special invitations to some of our events, and a few media issues, and was basically swamped. So, I missed out on the one "outing" our team was plotting — a quick shopping trip. It allowed me to catch up, though, as well as lie down for a few minutes. And they came back with Chinese cold drugs. Bitter, but good stuff. We ate at the hotel's Chinese restaurant. It really wasn't all that good, but then again, we were all exhausted and our bodies thought it was 3 a.m., so we were all goofy and probably unseemingly uncivilized. The fact that there were five of us and twenty wait staff — we were the only customers — didn't help the feeling that we were a bunch of grungy kids in a China shop. (No pun intended.) We then went back to work, expecting to review and approve the list of delegates to print our little badges. But the simple task ended up taking four hours, because we only realized then that the data entry initially done back home was a bit off. Names were backwards, titles were wrong, and basically lots of errors that would make our VIPs very mad were found. We ended up almost starting from scratch, comparing each entry against the paper forms (which we were smart to bring!). Steve and Bob arrived, and stopped in to ask how we were doing. I think most of us just groaned. Let's just say I have no recollection of how the evening ended, or when I got back to my room. I woke up feeling surprisingly better. When I went down for breakfast, I went straight for the miso. I kept it simple, but still filled up. Finally the tasks at hand again seemed manageable. We concentrated on the hotel signage (a seemingly simple task that ended up taking all day), finalizing the spouse program (ditto), and watching the delivery and setup of all our office equipment (mondo ditto). The vendor kept realizing they forgot one part or another (including the software we needed to work), and consistently sent five to eight people to handle a task that two employers normally would. If it wasn't so expensive, it would be thoroughly comical. Delegates started arriving, and calling and visiting for information. Runsheets — charts tracking the movement of several VIPs, minute by minute, through every formal function — were drafted. And the agenda was updated no fewer than ten times — each one requiring coordination with the hotel, replacing copies in folders and files, and of course re-uploaded to the website. All the while, I had to help the staff get acclimated to the new computers and programs (I kept our office held back at Win98 and Office 97 as a policy, but our machines here had Win2000 and Office 2000). Even with all that, I got back to my room surprisingly early — a little after midnight. I relaxed a bit, watched some Cinemax and HBO (and they were showing a cheesy movie called "Crash Point Zero," which included as part of its silly plot a badly staged airline hijacking — ick). I read the front page of the IHT, and passed out.

Comments E kala mai! Comments have been disabled due to overwhelming abuse by spammers. Please click through to any of the video hosting services linked above to leave a public response, or feel free to send an e-mail. Mahalo! < October 15 · October · October 17 > © 1997-2008 Ryan Kawailani Ozawa · E-Mail: imr@lightfantastic.org · Created: 13 November 1997 · Last Modified: 14 January 2008