So I am in France getting ready to give a business presentation at a ritzy allegedly Leading Hotel of the World and I have spent four hours trying to get any of their internet connections to work: weefee — aka wi-fi — is broken at the phone company with absolutely no customer service for a service that charges 30 euros per day; the hotel network does not work; I cannot use DSL because I do not have a French account; I finally said I was going to turn into the Ugly American and have a fit to get someone on the hotel staff to just figure it out. Still nothing. I would go into amusing, theatrical detail but the only means I have of getting onto the internet to whine to you has a French keyboard where qwerty becomes azerty, just to be different, and the period key requires using shift — confirming my long-held suspicion that, indeed, the French never do come to a period in their nonstop sentences. And I am about to go berserk on jetlag and frustration. So insert your own joke about why the French are a third-world country here: _____________________
: LATER: Someone woke up at the French telcom and access is working. Our next challenge was to find a projector in a hotel and land still dominated by — I swear — overhead projectors. Welcome to 1972.
