Today starts my ventures about the southwest and Rocky Mountains over the next ten days. I leave in a couple hours for ASHRAE in Dallas. 2 days of sles meetings, dinners and hospitality suites and another day and half of product show and suites. The room ain't cheap but I am splitting it with a coworker. The flight is taken care of via a credit from a trip I was supposed to take last spring. It could be intersting. Most meals and some alcohol is comped but I am going with an agenda other than just having fun a learning this year. It's all about networking and getting my name out. Hopefully I will have some good leads when I return. Hopefully I will also find out if everything is really bigger in Texas. We'll see, and if i do, it will make for some good reading later on. I mean why not, it's not like I am going to have to deal with anything past the next four days.
I get two days to pretend to catch up in the office and get some house chores such as laundry done before heading to Colorado with Poot and a couple of his boys to go skiing. That is a straight fun trip. No doubt. Super Bowl parties at 9000 feet should be a good time. I would say cheap drunk too, but I know nothing out there is cheap. At least it takes less, especially when it's my favorite beer, Fat Tire. Can't get it east of the mighty Mississippi so I must enjoy it as much as possible while there.
If anything fun or interesting happens, I'll throw a post up at my earliest opportunity.
Beep............
Friday, January 26, 2007
Monday, January 08, 2007
Stereotyping....No, Not Me.
As anyone who has traveled through Charlotte knows, I-77 can be quite busy. Traffic jams can occur at any time of day due to the city (and possibly state’s) inept at preparing for a growing population and the infrastructure issues created. Throw in that Charlotte is a distribution hub for multiple truck lines with it being an interstate crossroads and you can imagine the challenges on the roadways at any given time. As we all know, the morning and afternoon rush is going to be bad, it doesn’t matter if you are in Atlanta or Anderson. We have it no better here as you could guess.
In a rather quick manner, I learned some of the tricks for navigating the interstate at least coming into work in the mornings. Certain lanes move much quicker as they are not subject to direct merging on and off at the main downtown interchanges. From time to time to though, you get some real winners in these lanes. You know. That person that even in heavy, slowly moving traffic, stays back 5 car lengths and lets every Tom, Dick, and Harry merge in front of them. That same person that may pull up relatively close at a stand-still only to be the main reason of the snake effect once motion resumes. Normally they are in some clunker that just doesn’t have any acceleration left in the engine or somebody in an SUV busy talking on the cell phone (no headset). These are all stereotypical and it’s pretty easy to ID the driver type. This morning, I had the winner or all winners though. For starters, the car was a white Chevy Impala, government tags, and car ID number in the back window. A head silhouette was not present, at least not enough to see any curvature. No extra antennae present. The lag behind the car(s) in line was more than the usual 1-2 car max, and exceeded the 5 or so lengths I have come to sometimes accept before sputtering off multiple slurs and explicatives. It was easily 7-10 at any given time. Note, this was noted at speeds at or below 30MPH. You know where this is going. Automatically, I’m thinking fat black woman in her 30’s maybe pushing 40. I zip out into the left lane next to the HOV lane (this lane is usually slowed up by the HOV folks being forced to merge back in on down the road about a ½ mile) and pass them. Sure enough, I hit the nail on the head and to top it off, she is on her cell, no headset. I instantly begin thinking about writing this post as I cruise along. Typical Char-Meck government worker. Spends her commute on the phone then bitches about answering it when she gets to work, making sure that what ever service is providing the municipality is done at a bare minimum level.
Commute continues as normal. I have passed most of the main turnoffs where the bank folks peel off so traffic has lightened up, at least until I approach the lower side of the downtown loop where merging delays are common. I am catching traffic ahead of me with no one closing in behind me until I see what approaching, the White Impala. This crazy ass lady is still running her jaw and now she is doing 70+ and coming up quickly on one big ass bottleneck. Fortunately nothing bad happened. She got on the breaks, actually got in the quickest lane for traffic passing straight though and held her ground through the slow down without leaving big gaps. Who knows, maybe she got off the phone.
This is the kind of crap that kills me though. And I am sure it’s not limited to our traffic but damn. The sad part is, it takes about 2 seconds to profile the driver simply by the vehicle type. People can say what they want about racial profiling and all this PC crap. Until incidents like this morning start becoming young white men, I’ll keep calling it like it is.
Oh, and did you hear about the pizza joint in Texas taking pesos now? That’s a whole ‘nuther story. Yeah, that's a can of worms I'm not getting into this morning.
In a rather quick manner, I learned some of the tricks for navigating the interstate at least coming into work in the mornings. Certain lanes move much quicker as they are not subject to direct merging on and off at the main downtown interchanges. From time to time to though, you get some real winners in these lanes. You know. That person that even in heavy, slowly moving traffic, stays back 5 car lengths and lets every Tom, Dick, and Harry merge in front of them. That same person that may pull up relatively close at a stand-still only to be the main reason of the snake effect once motion resumes. Normally they are in some clunker that just doesn’t have any acceleration left in the engine or somebody in an SUV busy talking on the cell phone (no headset). These are all stereotypical and it’s pretty easy to ID the driver type. This morning, I had the winner or all winners though. For starters, the car was a white Chevy Impala, government tags, and car ID number in the back window. A head silhouette was not present, at least not enough to see any curvature. No extra antennae present. The lag behind the car(s) in line was more than the usual 1-2 car max, and exceeded the 5 or so lengths I have come to sometimes accept before sputtering off multiple slurs and explicatives. It was easily 7-10 at any given time. Note, this was noted at speeds at or below 30MPH. You know where this is going. Automatically, I’m thinking fat black woman in her 30’s maybe pushing 40. I zip out into the left lane next to the HOV lane (this lane is usually slowed up by the HOV folks being forced to merge back in on down the road about a ½ mile) and pass them. Sure enough, I hit the nail on the head and to top it off, she is on her cell, no headset. I instantly begin thinking about writing this post as I cruise along. Typical Char-Meck government worker. Spends her commute on the phone then bitches about answering it when she gets to work, making sure that what ever service is providing the municipality is done at a bare minimum level.
Commute continues as normal. I have passed most of the main turnoffs where the bank folks peel off so traffic has lightened up, at least until I approach the lower side of the downtown loop where merging delays are common. I am catching traffic ahead of me with no one closing in behind me until I see what approaching, the White Impala. This crazy ass lady is still running her jaw and now she is doing 70+ and coming up quickly on one big ass bottleneck. Fortunately nothing bad happened. She got on the breaks, actually got in the quickest lane for traffic passing straight though and held her ground through the slow down without leaving big gaps. Who knows, maybe she got off the phone.
This is the kind of crap that kills me though. And I am sure it’s not limited to our traffic but damn. The sad part is, it takes about 2 seconds to profile the driver simply by the vehicle type. People can say what they want about racial profiling and all this PC crap. Until incidents like this morning start becoming young white men, I’ll keep calling it like it is.
Oh, and did you hear about the pizza joint in Texas taking pesos now? That’s a whole ‘nuther story. Yeah, that's a can of worms I'm not getting into this morning.
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