China: Days 3-4
For those wondering, my plane landed four hours before a different one crashed about 450 miles to the west. I'm fine. Many on that plane, however, were not.
I slept through most of the post-maintenance day in Beijing. I woke up briefly to consider eating but instead went back to sleep and woke up when breakfast was being served. We all met in the lobby a few hours later to check out, head to lunch and then the airport. Lunch ended up being really good but was a bit of a hassle. Dragging large suitcases through a shopping mall in downtown Beijing is not fun. Element Fresh, however, has really good food.
I can tell I haven't had enough downtime between trips, though. We're not even halfway through and I'm already running out of patience with my co-workers. Usually I can last a week or two. Apparently my frustrations from Arizona didn't dissipate in a day. The working schedule here hasn't helped and neither has the weather. Temperatures in the nineties with 70% humidity do not make for a pleasant experience. We're not staying at our usual hotel here in Hangzhou, either. The room is, at best, adequate, the A/C is barely functional (it took basically 24 hours to get my room down to a reasonable level), I might as well sleep on the floor since the bed is just an elevated version, the room service menu is extremely limited with very poor quality and when we checked in they didn't take a credit card from us to authorize a deposit so when I did order something I had to pay with cash. I walked down and authorized a deposit this evening since we'll never actually be awake and here when anything is open. It annoyed me to sign for a deposit on a room I don't like just so I can order mediocre food. I'm going to be extremely irritated if that deposit isn't reversed when this is all over. I'm not convinced the trainee front desk person actually understood what I wanted. It's perhaps telling when we actually drove out of our way when we went to breakfast this morning to go eat at our usual hotel. The manager traveling with us said we might be moving back there tomorrow or the day after. They were full when we booked this trip. The only good thing about this hotel is they did actually provide non-down pillows without my having to ask and the person who cleaned my room paid attention to the fact that I'd discarded all the down pillows on the floor and took them away. The Internet is also quite a bit faster here than in Beijing, but I think that's because we're in South China and not this particular hotel. We're still behind the Great Firewall so that just means we can more quickly get to what little content is accessible.
We didn't do anything besides check in yesterday since we had maintenance at 2am this morning and had spent all day getting here. The maintenance itself was long and even longer because we had some extra stuff to do, hit a few snags and took a food break in the middle. Unfortunately, we'd had even less sleep before this maintenance than the first one so while the food helped we were even more wiped when we were done. We actually all left the data center as soon our work was done rather than waiting for the other teams to finish their stuff and go live. Then, just like before, I slept the rest of the day. Our plan for tomorrow (Today? It's technically after midnight...) is to go into the city for lunch, maybe do some shopping, dinner and then crash for a pre-maintenance nap. At least there's just one more to go.
I slept through most of the post-maintenance day in Beijing. I woke up briefly to consider eating but instead went back to sleep and woke up when breakfast was being served. We all met in the lobby a few hours later to check out, head to lunch and then the airport. Lunch ended up being really good but was a bit of a hassle. Dragging large suitcases through a shopping mall in downtown Beijing is not fun. Element Fresh, however, has really good food.
I can tell I haven't had enough downtime between trips, though. We're not even halfway through and I'm already running out of patience with my co-workers. Usually I can last a week or two. Apparently my frustrations from Arizona didn't dissipate in a day. The working schedule here hasn't helped and neither has the weather. Temperatures in the nineties with 70% humidity do not make for a pleasant experience. We're not staying at our usual hotel here in Hangzhou, either. The room is, at best, adequate, the A/C is barely functional (it took basically 24 hours to get my room down to a reasonable level), I might as well sleep on the floor since the bed is just an elevated version, the room service menu is extremely limited with very poor quality and when we checked in they didn't take a credit card from us to authorize a deposit so when I did order something I had to pay with cash. I walked down and authorized a deposit this evening since we'll never actually be awake and here when anything is open. It annoyed me to sign for a deposit on a room I don't like just so I can order mediocre food. I'm going to be extremely irritated if that deposit isn't reversed when this is all over. I'm not convinced the trainee front desk person actually understood what I wanted. It's perhaps telling when we actually drove out of our way when we went to breakfast this morning to go eat at our usual hotel. The manager traveling with us said we might be moving back there tomorrow or the day after. They were full when we booked this trip. The only good thing about this hotel is they did actually provide non-down pillows without my having to ask and the person who cleaned my room paid attention to the fact that I'd discarded all the down pillows on the floor and took them away. The Internet is also quite a bit faster here than in Beijing, but I think that's because we're in South China and not this particular hotel. We're still behind the Great Firewall so that just means we can more quickly get to what little content is accessible.
We didn't do anything besides check in yesterday since we had maintenance at 2am this morning and had spent all day getting here. The maintenance itself was long and even longer because we had some extra stuff to do, hit a few snags and took a food break in the middle. Unfortunately, we'd had even less sleep before this maintenance than the first one so while the food helped we were even more wiped when we were done. We actually all left the data center as soon our work was done rather than waiting for the other teams to finish their stuff and go live. Then, just like before, I slept the rest of the day. Our plan for tomorrow (Today? It's technically after midnight...) is to go into the city for lunch, maybe do some shopping, dinner and then crash for a pre-maintenance nap. At least there's just one more to go.