In which our hero gets lost in Denver, works his first hours in a copy shop, and visits many different hotels.
"Hans!". Yes, this tends to happen after attending a few CHI's as a Student Volunteer. Some people start to recognize you, and decide they'll talk you into doing some job or another for them. This time it was Melissa, Co-Chair of Signage, who needed some copying done. This sounded like a good enough job, so I said yes. It turned out to be the infamous copy job from hell which every CHI has had so far.At first sight these things seem quite reasonable, but I got suspicious shortly after Melissa started to explain what had to be copied, and how. The whole job was mind-boggling complex, with many different elements, which had to be combined in many different ways to form even more different originals. In addition to complexity, a deadline was added as well. It was more or less set to "now". It kinda looked like a real-world project.
According to somebody the copy shop was really close-by, so we could just walk there. We got an address, and some vague directions. Fortunately Dan, who also had to go to the copy shop, knew the street we were supposed to go to. We went ahead and started of for this street. The weather was really nice, you might even say warm, and walking through a downtown area has never been one of my favorites. Unfortunately we were in for some more walking, because after a while it became clear to us that we were on West Colfax, as opposed to East Colfax.
After this little detour we finally got to the copy shop, where all the fun could begin. Our contact person there wasn't working at that time, which was only the start. Each of our jobs was fairly complicated, and I'm sure we made life miserable for the copy shop people when we were trying to get our intentions across. After some additional negotiating we pretty much got our message through, though, and in fact the copying didn't turn out all that bad.
After copying Rob, the other Signage Co-Chair, and I went to all hotels to put our copying efforts on display. This wasn't very eventful, although we did get a good grasp of Denver's one-way street system this way.
Nothing much was happening at the conference center when we finally got back, so I decided to go out and have a beer with Ray, an old friend from my time at Georgia Tech. Afterwards I had dinner with some Student Volunteers at the Rock Bottom micro-brewery. Part Four