Mass. Trip '10: Why am I acting like a businessman?

DAY FOUR: The conference.  I’ve mentioned previously that Company 𝔾 is involved with conferences.  There’s one in the spring and one in the fall, never in the same city twice.  This year the spring conference was in Boston, which just happens to be the city name printed on my birth certificate.  Wifey had been agitating to do another Mass. Trip this year, so we timed it to coincide with the conference.

I have years of experience driving around in Boston, which doesn’t mean that I like it.  My Google directions told me to get off the Mass. Pike at Copley Square and immediately turn onto Huntington Ave., but I couldn’t do that.  When I got off the Pike, I was on Stuart St., which abuts Huntington but is one-way in a different direction.  So I had to go around in circles trying to get to where Huntington and Stuart meet.  When I eventually found the hotel where the conference was, it turned out that I had driven past it during a previous circle but hadn’t detected any of the signs (side-street name, hotel name, etc.) that would have clued me in.

It was nice entering the hotel, seeing that every conference room door had a sign with Company 𝔾’s name and the conference session numbers and titles that I had been manipulating with my software.  Yes, these conferences actually do exist in meatspace!  And people pay serious money to attend them.

I proceeded to the registration desk.  There I shook paws with “Mr. Bear”, for only the second time in the four years I have been working this job.  He introduced me to another fellow, whom I will be calling “Mr. Green” for reasons best left unsaid in a public post.  Officially, “Mr. Green” does not work for Company 𝔾, but for a separate company that I suppose I'll call “ℐ” in this journal.  The conferences are a joint production of 𝔾 and ℐ.  They’ve been doing this together for years.

I told “Mr. Green” that I had come all this way just to see him, which is actually sort of true in a way.  He was taken aback, but immediately asked me if my company could write some software for him.  I stammered for a moment, then said that I would have to hire some more staff but it should be possible to work something out.  His website software is crap and I think the organization as a whole would benefit if he could get some better people to work on it, but “Mr. Green” is computer-phobic and his current website represents his best effort to hire and manage software developers.

“Mr. Bear” went off to attend a session.  Eventually “Mr. Green” went off to some meeting or other.  So I was standing there at the registration desk, trying to decide what to do next.  Neither Bear nor Green had seemed particularly interested in introducing me to the attendee customers, probably because I was a little scruffy inside my clothes.  I don’t need a fursuit to be “furry”!  Eventually I decided to declare my mission a success and go home.  It was less than an hour of business meeting for a week of driving.  Doesn’t seem worth it, somehow.  It’s too bad that I can’t just fly to these meetings, but airplane travel has joined drug use as part of the US War Against Our Own Citizens and I do not enter warzones if I can help it.  Long-distance train travel is uncomfortable.  I wonder if I could go by boat?  It would probably cost a lot and take a long time, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if someone else were piloting the boat.  And it would need a satellite link for Internet access.  Perhaps I should look into that…

Returning to my hotel room in Billerica, I wrote a business email to “Mr. Green”, summarizing the points discussed in our meeting.  He replied later that day.  His reply is still sitting in my inbox.  I suppose I should do something with it; he is the easiest “second customer” that my business could ever get.  But I don’t want more customers!  I want to continue doing as little as I’m doing now and just get paid a whole lot more for it!  But I suppose I owe it to Canada (which has been very nice to me) to grow my business so it can employ Canadians and pay taxes.  shiver_raccoon says he might be able to rustle up some more “on-the-spectrum” folks who can appreciate the charms of this kind of virtual job.  But it takes months to develop a new subcontractor!  Maybe I should just go back to bed.

No, I wanted to talk to “Mr. Green” because I was sick of dealing with the garbage data that his website sends to mine.  I wanted him to fix his end.  He is (apparently) willing to pay me to do that for him.  There is Engineering Work To Be Done.  This isn’t the work that I had planned to do after moving to Canada, but it has fallen into my lap.