It is, I believe, a virtual certainty that no one has ever live-blogged an Operations Analysis/Research conference. Especially after returning to the hotel from a night spent debauching one’s self while watch a pretty damn good blues band named “Brickhouse” at a deceptively scruffy looking place known as the Yale Hotel. So, once again: Bleeding edge, etc.
The sorts and quality of other entertainment to be had at that hotel were legion, and suffice it to say that our merry group recovered to the hotel at 0200, having closed the place down in the company of a large number of new friends some thirty minutes earlier. Not one of whom was an OR conference attendee, apart from your humble scribe and his wingman, leading to the inevitable question:
Doesn’t anyone work anymore?
It was a hard slog, gentle reader, to lever one’s self out of the rack in time to make the 0730 continental breakfast, but sleeping in would have meant paying for it after – and we are already on notice that Certain Measures Toward Economizing will be necessary after viewing the howling void that is our wallet’s interior this morning – so it was time to cowboy up. The first couple of hours of symposium time – the lead speaker was the Chief Technology Officer from IBM – have left me feeling a little like the kid who was supposed to take a course in pre-Algebra but accidentally wandered in to the AP Calculus classroom instead: After having finally internalized the certainty that he is in the wrong classroom, he wrestles with the approach/avoidance conflict of drawing shameful attention by extricating himself from the situation against the fact that he is very probably being missed from the place he was actually meant to be. Frozen into an unaccustomed immobility, the knuckle-dragging fighter pilot guy gets through the ordeal by remembering his SERE training and observing to himself – quite casually – that a number of these math geek chicks are really, kind of, you know: Hot.
Intellectually stimulating I mean. Of course.
What did you think?
Developing…
–
Update: After the obligatory rubber chicken luncheon, we’re heading to what promises to be one of the highlights of the conference: The use of decision analysis tools and operations analysis in modern combat. The lecture is to be delivered by a senior Army officer who also teaches at West Point – one of the top four or five federal military academies in the country.
This promises to be a corker!
Update 2: (15 minutes later) THUNK! ***Zzzzzzzzzz***
Captain,
Thank you for your sacrifice and service to your contry. We need more like you, Sir!
Regarding your Q on working in Canada, it’s the source of the best salmon fishing guides on the planet. They can sleep and drink with the best of any on the planet. Be humbled, my scribe. You are amongst greatness.
V/r
SJBill
If you don’t take a run/bike ride around Stanley Park, the entire trip will have been for naught.
Did I understand you correctly that YOU were in the wrong room and, rather than leave and find the right room, YOU sat there glaring at the female attendees?
I guess you didn’t Cowboy Up quite hard enough…
There is no “right” room for me here, Babs. And “glaring” is such a harsh word. I prefer “admiring.”
Readers looking for perfect gentlemen should keep, you know: Looking
My image of Bruce Willis in whites has been shattered
Who the hell needs a perfect gentleman…how utterly boring. Glaring, Admiring – whatever.
Lex has lots more hair than bruce.
Lex, don’t feel bad. Look at it this way, while you’re sitting there wishing you understood the
greekmath, the guys who know what you do are thinking “wow, I wish I knew how to fly an F-18″It all evens out. You’ll learn when you retire and work with civilians that don’t have much military exposure that the most boring crappy stuff you ever did (eg midwatches on the bridge in the middle of nowhere) are amazingly exotic to people who’ve never done it.
Glaring, admiring.
How about ogling?
I think that technically covers both.
Babs,
Ya know, the nice thing about those aviator shades is that they not only hide the evidence of the previous night’s, er, sorties, but they also hide where one is ACTUALLY looking.
Consider it a recon mission, getting a sort of feel for the lay of the land, as it were…..
Respects,
Cap’n,
You actually are at an Operations Research Conference? That explains the problem, OR is a discipline most real folks treat like an experienced UNIX guru:
1. Put OR specialist in a padded room and keep them there until needed.
2. Bring OR specialist out, but do not let them get in front of customer and/or management.
3. Permit OR specialist to solve problem. Then hire a team of Technical Writers to translate their work into normal human-speak.
4. Return to Step One.
Caution – letting an OR specialist get in front of customers, management, or executives may lead to glassy eyes and incoherent mutterings and/or mumbling by the respective customer, manager or executive.
Oh, forgot something.
A PhD mathematician friend of mine at JHU/APL once said he could never understand Operations Research, no matter how hard he tried.
Sir:
And folks wonder about interservice rivalry, when graduates from one academy fall asleep during a lecture from a professor at another academy (let alone a P from THE ACADEMY).
OUCH!
SeniorD,
And everyone wonders why us Technical Writers walk around with glassy eyes muttering incoherently all the time!
I will never understand you normal people.
Or you Canadians, either.
Did the lecture fail to live up to expectations?
Or was it the post-prandial dip that got you, Lex?
That’s okay JTG.
Just think, it could be worse – imagine your life if you were Canadian, eh!
#7 above: “…You?
#7 above: “…You’ll learn when you retire and work with civilians that don’t have much military exposure that the most boring crappy stuff you ever did (eg midwatches on the bridge in the middle of nowhere) are amazingly exotic to people who’ve never done it.”
Too true.
LOL, that’s why TAD is meant for batchelors. Send an old married guy on the road, and what’s he do but stress the airframe. In the words of Harry Calahan, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”
Old married guy indeed, this is as pearls before swine.
Still, we soldier on. Nothing else for it.