As you’ve likely been made aware through various passive agressive posts here and in social media, or personal comments from me, I spent last week in Oklahoma for my organization’s annual IT Training Symposium. Traditionally, this organization has had it’s conferences in enviable places like Florida (for certain values of “enviable”, speaking personally), though thanks to stuff like this, management decided to tread carefully, so we ended up at a government-owned conference/training facility in Norman, Oklahoma, an outer suburb of Oklahoma City.

the place looked like a bunker or perhaps a minimum security prison from the outside, all gray concrete and small windows, surrounded by well-manicured, if not exactly attractive lawn – here’s the view from my cell hotel room window:

Inside, it wasn’t all that bad; it felt like a relatively typical hotel catering toward business travelers (the Government contracts management out to Marriott), except for the fact that it was very difficult to leave, as the vast majority of us, in the interests of managing costs and appearing frugal in light of recent linked-above events, made use of a shuttle bus to and from the airport, and did not have rental cars. The place ran nightly shuttles to local shopping centers (i.e. Wal-Mart and chain restaurants) or, one night, to a nearby casino on the reservation. Of course, there was an extra fee for these, and very little flexibility in terms of scheduling, and the destinations were, as you could say, lackluster. Most of us just made use of the on-site cafeteria-style restaurant for dinner (as breakfast and lunch were included in our conference fee, and thus, deducted from our per diem entitlement), which wasn’t bad, but variable in quality and price (a regular pasttime over the course of the week was comparing what each of us were charged for what was essentially the same meal).

As one does at these sorts of things, we spent most of the day in a ballroom watching powerpoint presentations, attending breakout sessions (nobody showed up to ours), and networking. However, as I soon came to understand and confirmed with my fellow attendees, this “symposium” really wasn’t for me; it was for the field services teams, spread far and wide across the planet (we have offices on five continents) setting up users’ equipment and manning the help desk. This is their chance go get together and complain to each other and maybe get an audience with the CIO to air grievances. I’m a mid-level headquarters guy; to them, I am at best, a benign presence, and at worst, part of the problem (I spend my days trying to stay out of the CIO’s office, because it means I’ll just get more work to do). Having worked help desk in a former life, I know what these guys deal with, in terms of clueless users and pressure to turn over phone calls, so I spoke their language, but honestly, I spent most of my time talking to them explaining what my job is and how if I do it right, they’ll never know I exist.

There was, at least, a few social events with free (bad) beer. I got to meet a bunch of folks face-to-face who I normally speak to only on the phone. At a couple of these, some of us bonded, forged relationships, and solved the agencies problems over a couple of mass-market fermented beverages. These events were held in a courtyard built in the middle of the property, not too far from the duck pond. The ducks are used to getting fed by visitors, and a few brave avian souls came over to see how the pickings were. As you’ll see below, one of them brought the kids, and it became a game of “ducks dodging drunks” for a while. Thankfully, nobody got hurt:

As we were largely stuck on the compound, all were eager for the supervised work release professional development field trip down the interstate to the Oklahoma City National Memorial and museum on the site of the bombing at the Murrah Federal Building back in 1995. It was nice to get out, and it’s a really well-put together memorial and museum. I’m glad I got the opportunity to visit, though it wasn’t the most cheerful place to go after eight hours of powerpoint. I took a few pictures outside on the grounds, including this shot of the reflecting pool and “field of empty chairs” representing those who died in the bombing. I was impressed with the way they put it all together, with the memorial park and monument laid out economically inside the former foundation of the building (the wall you see behind the chairs *is* the foundation of the Murrah building):

Otherwise, I really didn’t get to see much of the area; I was hoping for famed red clay and prairie scenery, but I pretty much only saw flat suburbia from the window of a bus. I did catch a couple of interesting shots from the windows of the bus, included below:

An honest-to-goodness oil well:

…and a monument to local celebrity:

I left on Friday morning, boarding the bus and sharing stories of shared misery (and oddly, stories about the late Dave Brockie of GWAR) on the shuttle ride to the airport, to find that when I printed my boarding pass at 7:30am, my 8:50 flight to Chicago was already delayed until 9:30 (and never got off the ground until almost noon). Luckily, I managed to book a later connecting flight, but I still ended up stuck in the the World’s Busiest Airport™ for a couple of hours before getting back home several hours later than expected.

It was, as they say, a trip that happened. Minimally useful, and a change of scenery and time zone, but all in all, I’d have been fine with not going at all.