The Bare Necessities

I think, if it really came down to it, all I need is a toilet and a good internet connection. I mention this because those are exactly the two things I've been living without the past couple of days. Yes, I'm still at a customer site here in scenic Slovakia. In a comment to one of my previous posts, Liz described her mental picture of the customer site as an isolated shack somewhere in the woods.

If only.

Imagine if you will an urban construction site. In a little out-of-the-way section of town, they're constructing a new office building. Down a couple unmarked alleys and behind some delapidated warehouses. There's a concrete facade of a building and big holes in the ground cordoned off by plastic tape. Crews of men are pouring concrete and pushing wheelbarrows around. It's exactly the sort of place the Russian mafia would go to dump a body.

You enter the structure of the building and carefully make your way up a couple flights of stairs. Carefully, because there are no walls in the staircase and it's a long way down. Everything is bare concrete. You make your way past the construction debris to the center of the building, to a flimsy temporary wall with a door.

Passing through the door is like moving into a different world entirely. Miraculously, there's a fully operational switch room inside: power, lights, racks of telco equipment, raised flooring, the whole nine yards. Hell, they even got security cameras up. I can't even begin to imagine how or why they installed all this equipment into a halfway finished building. Or, for that matter, why they considered plumbing to be so non-essential. Apparently, that's a "phase two" thing.

As for the internet connection ... you'd think I'd be in geek heaven. I'm in the middle of a freakin' data center, surrounded by LANs, IP switches, and high-speed data links. But it doesn't do *me* any good. Company security policy forbids me from jacking into their network. So I'm hobbling along with a GPRS phone that's "connected" to my laptop via the infra-red port. Of course, IR is a line-of-sight thing, so if I move the phone on the desk (or pick it up to answer it), I lose the connection.

Anyway ... that's all I got for now. Shutting down and going to bed.