i am sparticus: Getting Lost and Other Stories

Getting Lost and Other Stories

I've arrived home from the conference now, but I've got a bit of a back log to post. So apologies for the change in tense and what not. Hopefully it won't confuse you all too much.

The conference centre here, being a converted mansion, is one long winding maze of passage, stairwells and doors. It's not unusual to follow signs marked "Meeting Room 1" hoping to find some sort of meeting room only to meet similar signs pointing the way you came from. I'm so sure that if I looked hard enough I'd find a sign attached to a corridor ceiling that has "FIRE EXIT THIS WAY" written on it on both sides, but I'm not going to look because I don't think I'd ever find my way back to tell you about it.

The journey from my room to the main meeting area not only involves three staircases, eleven doors and six hallways but also a short journey out of the building and back in through the old conservatory. And that's just the way I know it from. In fact, I've found about four other ways of getting there that all involve completely different routes and quite possibly some inter-dimensional travel (I have more evidence for this than you might think, when I woke up this morning my feet felt like they were in Antarctica). The only thing that remains the same in them all is that at some point you have to go out the side door and in through the conservatory, which strikes me a tad lacking in design forethought. Again, there maybe a way of getting to the main meeting room without going outside but I'm not going to look because I don't think I'll ever find my way back.

All in all this lack of navigational ability is actually getting quite embarrassing. You spend a few minutes arranging with someone what time you're meeting for breakfast tomorrow (you can't go into breakfast on your own at one of these things, you might have to sit with people you don't know or worse, with people who eat grapefruit for breakfast), go your separate ways and then promptly run into each other three minutes later going opposite directions down the same corridor.

Still, I figure I may as well use this to my advantage, already I've positioned my laptop so that half of the processor exists in a dimension where everything is happening slightly ahead of this one. This may make my computer that much faster but so far this has only served to make me slightly depressed when I realised that I was destined to spend another fifteen minutes writing this and at the end of it all I still wouldn't have a half decent punchline.

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