Off to DC - Day 1

Well, I made it to DC safe and sound. It's been a bit of an ordeal througout the whole process thus far. First off, the limo service van came about 20 minutes early so I was still taking care of last minute things so it took a few minutes for me to get down to the van, and to top it all off I got a call from the dispatcher for the limo service telling me that she "needed to get the driver out of there", aka I needed to hurry up. Thankfully at that point I was climbing into the van, otherwise I would have given her a piece of my mind for getting there outside of the appointed time and then expecting me to be instantly accomodating to their changes.

Getting into the air was pretty rough with all of the wind gusting about off the water. It sucked because normally I love take-offs. This one I was tense the entire time. Not the most auspicious of beginnins. The rest of the flight went fairly well and the landing at Dulles was passable.

After this I take a bus to the Metro and then walk the block to the hotel. This was a bit of a pain since I had no idea where Pennsylvania Ave was from the train station and then I ended up going the wrong way. After getting turned around a few times I finally got the hotel. I have to say the room is nice. I went to get setup on the internet only to realize I had no ethernet cable. I packed EVERYTHING else I could need and I guess I just assumed they'd be doing wireless. Whoops! Well thankfully the front desk had an ethernet cable I could use. I then plugged in and got ready to check my e-mail etc and then... nothing. All I could get was a 169.*.*.* address, so I called the Front Desk, who told me to call the support company.

I called the support company and they walked me through about 5 tests I had already donen and then asked me to manually set the link speed to test that as well. Those tests all failed. At that point I exhasted the options at that level of support and I was told that they had to kick it up to Tier 3 so they could look at the network configuration of the Hote. I was told I should be contacted in about 30 minutes. 45 minutes later I called again and was told the SLA was 2 hours and that no one should have told me 30. I thanked the phone tech and waited for the rest of the 2 hour time period. 2 hours comes and goes so I call back. This time they kick me directly to Tier 3 and I get someone who walks me through additional steps, most I've already checked and still no success. At one point he has me empty my temporary internet files, which makes no sense at this point. I could understand if I had an IP and couldn't get to their internet provisioning server but at this point I still didn't have an IP. Finally he restarts the switch and voila, internet. The only good thing is that the entire time I was doing this I was sitting in my nice comfy hotel provided aeron chair.

So at this point I'm off to bed so I can get up for breakfast and training tomorrow. Lets hope things go smoother tomorrow.