This Week in E-Mail Auto Response, 1/5 - 1/10

This past week I was in fact out of the office, for the whole week, at the national sales meeting for Macmillan Higher Education (where I work) and the high school division, BFW High School. So you'll sense of theme.

Monday, January 5: A Room w/ a View, But in Only One Direction

I am in Huntington Beach, CA until Friday, at a hotel across the street - US 1, the Pacific Coast Highway - from the beach. Sadly, there is too much sand on the beach for my taste, the water is salty, so I will not cross over to the waves. But at least if you look west you see water, though not quite blue in color, more an industrial gray heavy green.

But it's nice to look at, maybe the only thing nice:

If you look south from the hotel, it's flat and dull until you see what look likes some kind of oil storage or processing facility, all done in gray.

If you look north, there's construction, with iron skeletons of shops, hotels, and condos yet to be born in the rust red and black of new iron works encased all around by silver scaffolding.

And to look east from the hotel, it's all gated communities with walls and Spanish style roofs.

-- So look west, especially at sunset:

West is best.

Tuesday, January 6: Lots of Books Get Carried and Shipped

A Textbook Publisher Sales Meeting Limerick:

A meeting in California

Is a textbook cornucopia

  If you happen to go,

  You really should know

That too many books gives a hernia

Wednesday, January 7: Apologies to Princess Leia

A long time ago, in a state far, far away . . .

. . . It is a period of the sales meeting

Travel away from Boston, gripped

in wind chill readings of minus -24

degrees, means those from there who

are here in Huntington Beach, CA have

won their first victory.

During the meeting, restless reps

make secret plans for their free afternoon.

Avoiding the doom of cognitive overload,

the break should refresh people with

enough power to survive through Thursday.

Friday, everyone who hasn't already left,

races home, most in cramped and crappy

coach seats, custodians of plans

that can save schools from the Evil

Galactic Empire's  MyLab Plus and restore

learning to the galaxy....

Thursday, January 8: If I'm Not at  E-Mail, You Shouldn't Be Either.

I am in the office, not out. I have access to email. So nothing's changed. But still, I may not reply automatically except for this automatic reply.

My office is my laptop, and it is in a hotel in California, not to be confused with the Hotel California in Peoria, Illinois. I am not at my laptop right now. I am either in a car on the way to campus, at a meeting at this hotel in one of their conference rooms, or six paces away on the bed watching a movie from 20 years ago where Richerd Gere is a lawyer defending an altar boy who . . . cannot stay awake any more.

I hope this reply finds you well and ready for the weekend, which can start now if you like. Really, go ahead. Leave, go home, get a drink, call it 5 pm on Friday. I won't tell.

Friday, January 9: Switching Songs of Home

All my bag's are packed, I'm ready to go . . .

Just can't wait to get home again . . .

To see my wife again . . .

Be in her arms again . . .

To wake up Saturday morning with her again . . .

Bonus -- Saturday, January 10: No, Not a Bad Cocaine Memory

I really wish it were possible to eat broth with a fork. Spoons scare me.