About 1988 I had enough material on computer viruses to put together a 2 day seminar. This was, in outline, what would eventually become "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses." (I should note that the title is not my idea, publishers get to decide these things rather than authors.)
The company that decided to give the virus seminars a try, sent me up with back-to-back seminars in Washington, DC, and New York City. These seminars were not a terrific start. The first seminar was in Washington, DC. The hotel in which the seminar was to be held was not one with which my taxi driver was familiar. I had flown into Washington's then National now Reagan airport, and I knew that it connected with the metro subway system. However I didn't know where the hotel was so I took a taxi.
The cab driver did not know where the hotel was. At one point he was driving around a certain area, and then stopped and radioed his dispatch to get instructions. They gave the instructions to him and he then found the hotel, at which point I realized that he had driven around the hotel twice in trying to find it. When I went in and registered at the hotel, and headed down the hallway to the elevators to go up to my room, I also realized that there was actually a Metro station in the basement of the hotel. I did not take a taxi back to the airport when the seminar was finished.
I had of course, arrived on Sunday night to get ready for the seminar to start on Monday morning. The company had shipped what was fairly standard for presentations at that time, an overhead LCD display, which was placed on top of an overhead projector, which was used as a light source to project the computer screen onto a screen on the wall. Direct video projectors for computer displays were, at this time, still very large and bulky and the LCD screen for an overhead projector was the easiest way in a facility that didn't have a fixed projector to get computer images to display to a seminar or classroom.
This display, and a computer to run it, had been shipped, by the training company, to the hotel. Having checked in and put my bags in my room, I then checked with the hotel staff to see if my shipment had arrived properly. It had arrived, but when I examined the contents of the shipment, the flat panel LCD display had no display. These panels were generally a fairly heavy frame around a what appeared to be a glass plate, which would be the LCD display. In this particular case a forklift and obviously been used either to move this package or near my packages and obviously one of the forks had gone completely through the box and the display itself. There was the frame, and some broken glass around the edges, but obviously the display panel was completely unusable.
I phoned the training company. Even though it was a Sunday, and 8:00 in the evening in Washington, DC, in California where the training company was headquartered, it was still just barely the end of the working day, and they were used to dealing with emergencies on a Sunday. I explained the situation, and they arranged a rental of a display unit which I would use for the course in Washington.
However, that was not the end of the problems. The next morning I got up, I got dressed, checked with the hotel for the delivery of the rental, which had arrived, and got everything set up in the seminar room. I checked that everything was working and it was. It was getting close to 9 am, the scheduled start time and a couple of people had arrived.
And then the fire alarm went off.
We had to evacuate the hotel. Myself and the two people have had already arrived for the seminar, we're out on the street. Literally. The fire department arrived and went into the hotel. After some time it turned out that the alarm have been a false alarm and there was, in fact, no fire. So we were allowed back into the hotel.
At this point it was just a few minutes before 9:00, and so I thought that that was about all that could go wrong, and that the seminar would be smooth sailing from here on in.
I was wrong. At two minutes to 9:00 the fire alarm rang again, and again we had to evacuate the building and we're all out on the street. Once again the fire department came, and once again it was determined that the fire alarm was a false alarm, and we were allowed back into the hotel I was eventually able to start the seminar.
On Tuesday evening I had finished the seminar in Washington, DC, and took the Metro back to the airport. I was booked on a flight for New York city. In those dim and distant days, there was an airline called the Trump shuttle. As far as I knew it only ever flew between Washington, DC and New York City, but it did fly hourly flights. The airline eventually failed, and it was one of the Trump shuttle airline airplanes, from the field airline, that was Trump's private plane for the Trump corporation, and which Donald Trump used as his campaign during his 2016 presidential campaign.
I was actually booked on a later flight than the one that was available when I got to the airport, but I was allowed to board that flight. Once I boarded the flight, I found myself in a scene that I had imagined only existed in movies and television shows. Walking down the aisles of the aircraft were people with bad mullets and brilliantined hair that gave new definition to the term "greasy." They were trying to promote, carry on, or close various types of deals as they were walking. I did feel that I had somehow stumbled into the set of a very bad television show about wheeler-dealers from New York City.
In New York City itself, the venue for the seminar was not in the hotel where I was staying, but in a facility across the street. Obviously this was a facility that was purpose built for rental two companies that were holding seminars. A number of seminars we're being held in the various rooms in this facility. I very quickly learned to make sure that I gave my class breaks slightly ahead of what would be considered normal break time. This was because whenever a normal break time came, all the seminar rooms let out at about the same time, and everyone from the seminar rooms madly rushed to the banks of pay phones that were situated in every available corner that wasn't actually occupied with the seminar rooms.
I found this rather strange. At this point cell phones were fairly common in Vancouver. My baby brother, the entrepreneur, had, of course, purchased one sometime back. And his wife used it not nearly for business purposes but to get directions, on the fly, when they were driving to somebody's house that they hadn't previously been to. Cell phones were, in fact, so common in Vancouver that I had seen one situation where four people, sitting at a table in a restaurant, had five of the old banana type cell phones, standing in a cluster in the center of the table. It kind of felt like one phone per person, and one extra for the table.
Surely, I thought, New York City, centre of the business universe, home of the wheeler-dealers that I had seen on the Trump shuttle, would have a large number of people with cell phones. Apparently not so. I asked those who were attending my class in New York City and none of them had a cell phone. Only one person who was attending the seminar actually knew anybody who *had* a cell phone. It seemed a bit odd to me but I guess that's just the vagaries of market penetration, and how people do business.
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