The curse?

[jayfurr]

A few weeks ago I traveled to a mid-Atlantic customer to do a couple days of training. Flew down, arriving by early afternoon the day before I was scheduled to be onsite, checked into my hotel, and then said to myself "Gee, I don't actually feel so good." Took a nap and woke up feeling pretty rotten. Went out, got a bunch of sick-person-friendly comestibles and beverages and came back to the room to try to perk myself up. Went back to bed and proceeded to have one of the worst nights I've ever had. Shaking with fever, then shivering with chills, achy throughout, just wishing I could die, etcetera.

Woke up in the morning and realized I was in no shape to be Mr. Perky Trainer for two days and called my boss, who then called the customer and explained the situation. I went back to bed, woke up in early afternoon, tried to find a local doctor who'd take me as a walk-in, couldn't, tried to get Anthem BCBS to help me out, and they couldn't. So I flew home that day and saw my doctor the next day and got told "48-hour stomach virus, we've seen a couple hundred people come through here with it, some of our staff even had it, it's awful, but it goes away quickly." And by that point, I was feeling much better. Pity it hadn't hit earlier in the week, but c'est la vie. The customer was understanding and we rescheduled for ... this week.

Flew down yesterday. Got there real early because I needed to be on a conference call all afternoon about an unrelated project and didn't want to be flying or risking taking the last flight out afterwards. My hotel was understanding and let me check in at 11. I went to my room, booted my laptop, checked email, and ... found a note from the customer sent while I was in the air saying "Stuff has come up. This week won't work at ALL". I wrote back to say, "er, I'm already here". They hemmed and hawed for a bit and then said "Sorry. There's really no way."

So I flew back the same day.

Prior to this stuff happening I'd never had a single occurrence of "go all the way to the customer's town and leave again without ever actually walking in their front door". Now it's happened twice in a month -- at the SAME CUSTOMER.

I think something, somewhere, doesn't want me training that customer.

Comments

[bethzebra.livejournal.com]

You never know - this is what I would call a Fortunately/Unfortunately situation. Maybe it's a curse that doesn't want you training that customer, but maybe it's keeping you from meeting yourself in a time travel scenario, or preventing you from being tracked by a Ninja assassin, or something.

[jayfurr.livejournal.com]

A ninja assassin might be a good thing. I've long suspected that I'm secretly a malign influence on the world around me and it's only a matter of time before the Legion of Right or someone similar shows up to deal with me.