15-X-2007.
The actual first day of asrm. I didn't do a stand day since ifabo... and found out I'm still in good shape, didn't get too tired. The coffee was aplenty, if not the best. I brought my nezavisni laptop, with Ubuntu already on it, and demoed very little from it (... 14 words...) because the driver for extra monitor didn't quite work - never got the resolution right. Since Feds is pure fox and ActiveXes, it runs only on Windowses (I guess XP at the time), I RDP'd into Firriver's server (at Jan's home at the time) and ran it from there.
Shot this around 9, when everyone's still setting up the stands, plugging in the monitors, checking connections, moving chairs. At 10:30 sharp the mass poured in, and they all went milling around and visiting the stands. Luckily, the one stand that mattered, the one with coffee, was right behind us (their banner is visible on the first picture, above the monitor), and the coffee was free. Mediocre, thin, nothing much, but contained what it takes and kept us on our feet throughout the day.
For lunch we went to a cafeteria (almost wrote „kafilerija*“, habit from the nineties); the grub was so-so... fills the gut but acually worse than what I found in hole-in-the-wall joints on Manhattan just a couple of years ago - stink of canola oil that's seen the pan too many times, lots of sour smells but doesn't resemble a true mess hall, guess zaprška is missing. But wasn't too expensive, though I could have eaten twice as much on any fast food stand out on the street. Not this street, this is downtown DC and the money gravity is much stronger here.
Around 15:00 I caught a break - not a smoke break, still not smoking, and danced a round of photo safari around the hall, playing a tourist a bit even though I'm staff. Met some interesting colleague stand girls (of which I'm almost certain not to be doctors), one by surname February (the one case where proper case is justified), luckily first name not April. And three others were so ready to pose for me, the middle one being really merry and forthcoming. But I wasn't in the mood for that either, it's too complicated and I don't really need that.
Having heard that the specs for SHET have just changed, and that their key programmer was just milling around (of course, we were all just a sideshow, the clinics that we both service are running it), I tried to catch him and get the specs directly, and ask a few questions. I managed to catch him on third day, but with very little luck - he was evading questions, promising without really promising ("yeah sure I'll email you") and generally tried to get lost asap. Few weeks later I heard he abandoned ship.
(from left: Jan, Noriko, Carrie, Norman)
Around 16:30 the crowd thinned out, so we kept company to our neighboring stands. Around 18:00 the official presentations in the big hall next door were finished and then the beer was free (they at least had Heineken and Amstel, though Jan says that one is good to wash feet and the other for toilet seats, they don't drink that at home, there are better ones, this is... for export). The waitress was really cute, I gave her a tip (the only one this year). Though she suffered from that same syndrome as 99% of the black girls do, whereby their hair becomes straight around puberty - I guess in these eight years I saw less than ten that were immune. Doesn't affect the males, though. Genetics is a bitch.
Closing time was around 19:00, and we took these two (who work for one of our San Fran clients, though not SFBC, there are others) for dinner. David, of course, knows good places in any larger city, and the food was good, the wine was too, and we had good time around the table in this separé, it's only that it was in the shop window; I sat with curtain behind my back, a bit awkward, but didn't allow that to disturb me.
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* our dictionaries have it as a german loan word from XVII century, it means a dog pound, but not quite that - it's where they drop (and process) dead animals
Mentions: asrm, David Berton, Feds, Firriver Fertility (Firriver), fox, ifabo, Jan Brenkelen, nezavisni, Norman Shen, SFBC, SHET, zaprška, in serbian