Friday

Oct, 5, 2001

Milano

Two good things today. One: I have to present to employees and talk to journalists but I don't have customers. Two: it is Friday. So I get to stay in this hotel until tomorrow and don't have to pack. You never really unpack for one or two days, but having to get everything organized and buttoned up in the bag each day is a pain. Now I'm looking forward to getting to leave my toothbrush in the bathroom for multiple days in Florence.

I have breakfast and some strong coffee. The room has an espresso maker but the compressed in paper packets don't make a very good product. Still, it's a first in my cataloging of hotel amenities. There is also a button by the bed that turns on a light outside. I can't decide if this a 'do not disturb' or a call for help. Nothing in the room explains this. I won't be here long enough to care.

We take a cab to the office. It's nearby, we think, but we aren't sure where. The cabby goes around in some circles and gets going the right way and gets us there. We still don't know where we are!

I listen in to sales training and do pre-sales for three attentive guys who are knowledgable and ask questions. After the sales presentation we stand in a circle with the conversation going from English to Italian and back again and with us losing the thread every time it enters the foreign language. We only hear the names of companies and products, standing out like sore thumbs in the flowing language that seems to parody itself.

We do some work hooked up around a conference table, discussing customers and marketing plans and whatever our e-mail has brought us.

I have never been interviewed by the press. Our leader on this trip has had a class on interfacing with the media. (Who knew?) He takes control of the first interview and does a really nice job. I add a couple of things so I won't look like a stump. He is off to Rome for the weekend, though, and has to head to the Linate airport. (It will be in the news on Monday, when Italy's worst airline disaster in history will occur in a ground fog there. It's foggy today, in fact, or we are told we could see the mountains.)

My workmate from the Netherlands stays to help me handle the journalist (from Italian ComputerWorld) who will show up at 5:30pm. So we do some more work on e-mail and such and get little strong cups of coffee out of a machine in their cafe and smoking room nearby.

The interview is interesting. The questions show a pretty good knowledge of what the business is and the competition. At the end, though, he asks me a question that is off the topic at hand. "As an expert in the database field," he says. It concerns another company, its acquisition, and what will happen with the products of the acquired company and its customers. I think I land on my feet. Anyway, who is going to read the ComputerWorld in Italian? Will I even know what I said if I get a copy?

Finally done with work, we pack up our PCs and get a cab back to the hotel. It isn't far, but it is dark and we have no idea where we are. It costs 11,000 lire. Which, I've learned, ain't all that much. Around six dollars or less.

We run into my other work buddy and her husband in the lobby. They've done some sightseeing. I have missed Milan this trip. But it is a business trip. I'm thinking of the end of next week when I will really, really have some time off. Be a tourist. Get foot sore from walking on cobblestones and wandering aimlessly and climbing to the top of things.

This week of shooting across Europe had made be weary. Tomorrow I'll sleep in and then fly to Florence. But tonight we need some dinner. My buddy has been congratulated for a sale he helped with so we got a glass of bubbly in the hotel bar first.

Then we walked around the bleak area around the hotel and finally settled on a Jamacian restaurant because there didn't seem to be anything else much. There were car dealers and clubs with boisterous young people spilling into the street. The waitress was from Virginia or some place. She wanted to know where we were from. "Texas," I drawled. "The Netherlands," said my buddy in his clipped way of speaking English.

We have a night cap in the hotel bar. It's very nice going back to my room and thinking that I can sleep as late as I want to. We've agreed to checkout at the latest possible moment and then go to the airport and wait for our flight to Florence.

"Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace..."

John Lennon, "Imagine"

Meta:
We'll just be keeping Lennon's radical lyrics here indefinitely. I'm updating this after the fact. Which means, of course, that I forget even more than usual.

JUST TYPING
A town, to you.
Is just what you see of it.
I visited.
Long ago.
Walking through the beautiful galleria.
This trip, it's taxis, business people, graffiti and a Jamaican restaurant, the only place to eat we saw save the hotel.
Loud clubs with young people spilling out.
Not quaint.