Time to Update...

Well, the last week has not exactly been overflowing with excitement, other than I am for the most part very bored while at work, and spend most of my free time reading. Namyang is just that uninteresting. I have made a handful of new friends around here, including Scott, a shaved-head sporting, Harley Davidson T-shirt wearing, no-punch-pulling Texan who was here for a week. I'm kind of a big scary guy with my goatee, he was king of a big scary guy with a goatee, it was inevitable.

Scott and I had a fun little sympathy session outside of the elevators a few days ago. The good news is, misery loves company. Scott works for a company that does rapid prototyping. I don't exactly know what this means, but I do know that he finished setting up his machine at the R&D center around 1pm that day, got it running, debugged it, and announced he was heading back to the hotel so he could catch up on some other things and get back into his computer (recall, they tape up all the data ports on your laptop). Alas! His contact, quite upset with this statement, told him that no, he was not allowed to leave, he had to stay to do his work. Scott indicated that his work there was done, that all he would be doing is watch the machine run, so it was better for him to go back to the hotel. He was summarily told, without exception, that he was to sit and watch the machine until 5pm, just the like the rest of us. So he did what any red-blooded American would do when faced with such a situation: he put a chair in front of that machine, leaned back in it, put his feet up, and took a nap. Eventually his stubborn behavior won out in the end, and he was 'allowed' to leave half an hour early.

Of course, when he asked how long I was here and I told him since September, he just shook his head slowly and said "you poor bastard."

So the good news is, I'm not alone. The bad news is, if I don't have it worse than anyone else, I apparently have it longer than anyone else. Suffice it to say, I get on an airplane on Friday morning to come home for Thanksgiving, and I am already packed.