Tuscan Telephony

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This week I'm in Italy for work. When I travel for work, I typically like to find a Marriott or some other faceless, bland hotel to stay in if at all possible. While I may miss out on some charm of a 'unique' bed & breakfast, all I really want in a hotel on a business trip is a decent bed, an iron, and a connection for my laptop. Broadband is preferable, but at the very least an empty phone jack. And these are things I can (usually) count on from one of the cookie-cutter big chains. Our main office in Italy is lovely Siena, in the heart of Tuscany. It's a beautiful medieval town, with, it turns out, matching medieval phones. I sort of laughed when I walked into my room in the Villa Patrizia and saw the phone was a leftover from a 1962 estate sale. I used my internationally enabled cell phone to call my bride and share a chuckle. Rotary! Good thing I don't have to use that!

Not so fast, kemosabe. This rotary phone is hardwired into the wall. No convenient jack to hook my laptop into. Oy. And then I experienced the 5 o' clock Italian Mobile Madness - when the cell networks all jam up and it's impossible to keep a connection on your mobile phone. Murphy dictated that this coincided with a teleconference I was to dial into. After more than a half dozen attempts, the folks in the US asked me to quickly dial in via a land-line.

Quickly. With a rotary phone. Let me remind you what it takes to dial from Italy to the US. 0 (to get an external line). (Wait a minute.) (Ah. Ok, done.) 0 (Wait. Wait. Wait.) (Nope. Wait again.) 0 (Wait. Wait. Wait.) (Nope again. Ok, now.) Now proceed to dial the 10 digit number...

Welcome to the middle ages. By the way, the silver buttons on the bedside table were the remote control for the television. Thank God the food here makes up for any electronic inconvenience.

The other two pictures are pictures I took in the countryside on the way out to one of our sites. I was trying to get one of my Italian colleagues to identify this huge castle like building. And I was risking life and limb to do so, as this guy on a tractor was driving in a straight line at me while I was taking pictures.





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Toys 'R Now Them

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Toys 'R Us sells the biz.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Toys R Us Inc on Thursday said it agreed to sell the entire company, including its namesake toy chain and Babies R Us business, to an investment group of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Bain Capital and Vornado Realty Trust for $26.75 per share, or $6.6 billion, plus debt.
Which is, like, great for the now rich Toys, who, once recovered from their celebratory Toy bingers, I assume will go spend their hard earned gains on Toy mansions and Toy trophy wives. But not so great for my critter. I don't think she's going to want any of the new product lines of 'Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Bain Capital Vornado 'R Us'.
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First day of spring

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OK, it's not really the first day. It just feels that way. After hiding behind a giant sky-blotting grey sponge for the past several months, the sun has made an appearance and it's finally gotten above zero degrees here (Celsius), and shot right up to 16 degrees or so. I'm not exactly sure what that is in Fahrenheit. At least 90 or 95. Well, maybe not, but after a long spell of cold dampness, it feels like it. To celebrate, my bride and the critter came to meet me for lunch. Feeling nostalgic, we went not to a great little pub outside the church where John and Paul met. (What do you mean 'John and Paul, who?' This is Liverpool, remember? John and Paul played rhythm guitar for Echo and the Bunnymen), but instead went to Pizza Hut for the celebrated consumption-fest that is the Buffet of Mediocrity. I skipped right by the 'sweetcorn and green pepper' pizza and the 'American breadsticks' (I'm not sure what made them American. They didn't taste like Americans, particularly) and headed for the pepperoni and salad bar. They have ranch dressing. I refer you to my earlier post on the topic. They have ranch-sniffing dogs at every port on the island, trained to keep the foreign dressing off these pure English shores. I have no idea how the Corporation slipped it by them. Corruption in the highest levels of Westminster, no doubt. In the end, I thanked the stars above for the Ranch, as I discovered that there's a reason they don't call it 'Salad Hut.' The salad it covered was pretty terrible. The only bright spot were the cherry tomatoes. Not that they were particularly shining icons of tomato-ness, but Ella had never had them before, and amused her father by consuming 23 of them in a row. My bride, who wasn't paying as close attention (though I'm not sure how she missed me making repeated trips for plates full of cherry tomatoes - what did she think that I was eating them all?) couldn't understand why I didn't stop her. I told her that the encouragement and experimentation to discover a freakish talent was nature's way of keeping parents interested in rearing the hyperactive racoon that is a two year old child.
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