Day One of the Bus

Bob Simms has won a seat on the Born to Learn bus tour of Europe, ending at Tech Ed in Berlin.

Thursday 29^th October

The alarm sounded at five.  Today was the day!  By five thirty I was sitting in the living room, twitching the curtain at every car that passed.  ‘Er Indoors joined me, to see me off and to ask every two minutes whether I had packed my passport, my money, my tablets, etc.

Shortly after six my brother Tony arrived.  I opened the door as he knocked, bags in hand.  I pecked ‘Er Indoors on the cheek and all but ran to his car.  Forty-five minutes later and we were in Greenwich.

“The road we want is …just …there!” I said, as we passed the University.

“And there’s the bus,“ said Tony.  “Nyah nyah, I saw it first.”

Damn!  And I had been practicing shouting, ‘Zee bus, zee bus!’ all week.  We took a spin around the Greenwich one way system.

“Come on,“ I said.  “Meet the crew.”

“No, I need to get moving.  Enjoy yourself.”

I walked up to the bus and rapped on the door.  The bleary-eyed driver opened it.  The crew were away in a hotel showering and whatnot.  I dumped my bags on a spare bunk and sat on the leather couch, twiddling my thumbs.  I felt as though I were in someone’s house.  I was frightened to touch anything.  After quarter of an hour Dave the Driver popped his head up and invited me into the lounge downstairs.  They had a kettle and teabags.  Well, it was a start, but not quite the upbeat welcome I was expecting.  Dave left in search of a newsagent.  I found the wifi password stuck to the bulkhead and I logged on.  Ho hum.

A few minutes later a large car pulled up and out spilled the crew.  I ran out of the bus as they pulled bags and bodies from the car.

“Hi, hi, how are you?  I’m here, I’m here.”

I shook Tjeerd’s hand.  He looked a little bemused.

“Hi, I’m Tjeerd.”

“I know.  We met briefly in Berlin last year.”

“Oh, okay.  Um, who are you?”

Definitely not the welcome I was expecting, but there was a spark of recognition when I explained exactly who I was and why I was there.   We piled onto the bus.  People started passing boxes around, reorganising cases, doing stuff that looked useful.  I lurked, trying to look inconspicuous and trying not to let my six feet three frame get in anyone’s way.  Tjeerd hooked out a couple of T-shirts for me.  Five minutes into the tour and I already had my first items of swag, but I still felt like a spare wheel.  It was as though this was the Big Brother house, and I was the surprise entrant that had been dropped in halfway through the series.

Suddenly chaos erupted.  Things weren’t going to plan.  A failure to communicate, as Paul Newman might have said, had left us without a room and emergency measures had to be put in place immediately.  Just as it hit the fan Tony appeared at the door.

“Delivery for Mr Bob Simms,“ he called.

I left the mayhem and stepped outside.  Tony held a box covered in Get On The Bus logos.

“What’s this?” I asked, opening the box.  “And what are you doing back here?”

Inside the box was the most amazing collection of swag he had spent the last week making for me, including a framed photograph of me and Bill Gates, a Get On The Booze bottle opener, a Microsoft Certified Sex God T-shirt and a laminated sheet of questionable phrases translated into French, Dutch, Czech and very dodgy German.  I was bowled over.  But why had he come back an hour later?  Because he was attending the roadshow as a delegate, and the little tinker hadn’t told me.  I thanked him profusely and returned into the bus to sit on the sidelines and try and amuse myself.

Fat chance.

“Bob.  You’re local.  I want the phone number of every hotel within five minutes of this location.  My phone’s dying.  Give me yours.  What’s that place over there?  The National Maritime Museum?  Get me their phone number.”  There was a panic on, and I could translate into the local language.

Ten minutes later I was dispatched to get a projector from a local hotel.  Time was of the essence.  Take a cab.

Now, in central London you can’t step into the road without being hit by a London cab, but this wasn’t central London, this was Greenwich.  I began to jog towards the town centre, constantly looking over my shoulder for a cab.  I was still looking when I arrived at the hotel, breathless and my nice new swag T-shirt damp with sweat.

Projector secured I grabbed a cab that had just dropped a guest off at the hotel for the five minute drive back to the campus.  The Microsoft sessions got underway, first in the cafeteria, then crammed into a small room that was apparently the only spare room in the greater London area.  I wasn’t presenting, but that was no excuse to sit idly around.  Little jobs kept me busy, until towards the end of the event I made the round trip to the hotel to return the projector, though this time at a slightly more sedate pace.

The bus crew at this point was somewhat fluid, and we now consisted of an American, a Frenchman, a French-Canadian and me.  The foreigners wanted a fish and chip lunch, because obviously, that’s the only thing that the English eat.  No, said Dave the Driver, not if we wanted to get to York by five, so we all bundled into the luxury upper deck lounge and sank into the leather couch.

Picture the scene.  Four strangers, thrown together by their shared love of technology, from four different countries, speeding through the English countryside on a five hour journey.  How would we pass the time?  Could we solve the problems of the world that the UN seemed incapable of?  Would we swap life stories, pictures of our kids, tales of difficult technical battles fought and won?  No, of course not.  All four of us opened our laptops.

At one point David (not Dave the Driver, but Dave the French-Canadian Exchange guru) lost his phone.  Was I sitting on it?

I checked.  No, nor was it on the table, or behind my cushion.  Where would a slim phone hide on a couch covered in plush leather?  Where would you look?  I slid my hand down between the seat and the back of the couch.

“Eww!”

I pulled my hand out.  My fingers were covered in margarine.  At least, it looked like margarine.  Oh God, please let it be margarine.  My fellow crew members empathised by collapsing in hysterical laughter.  I grabbed tissue after tissue.

“You know who had this bus before us?” asked Melissa.  “Snoop Dog.  For real.  I’d wash that real quick.”

Wash it?  I wanted to scrub it, coat it in antiseptic hand lotion and then boil it.  I dashed to the bathroom.

Bathrooms are strange affairs.  They always seem foreign and unfamiliar if not my own.  This one took strange to a new level.  For a start, the ceiling was four feet from floor.  A sign requested gentlemen to sit when using the facilities.  You’d need to be a hunchback dwarf to be able to stand.  Amazingly there was a shaver point in the cubicle.  How anyone could shave under those circumstances was a mystery, unless they had a chiropractor on standby.

We arrived in York.  Tjeerd and Liberty (no really, that’s her name) (No, honestly, I’m not making that up) (Well, yes, of course she’s American) had caught the train there for the afternoon showing.  We arrived around five.  The local Microsoft representatives met us.  It was a large audience, much larger than Greenwich.

I started moving boxes of T-shirts from the bus to the conference centre.  Someone shook my hand.  I assumed he was Microsoft and we chatted.

“So you’re on the bus?”

“Yes,“ I said proudly.  “Though I don’t work for Microsoft.  I work for QA.”

“Really?  So do I.  Oh wait.  Are you Bob Simms?  I read your blogs.”

It’s very worrying when someone recognises me from my on-line persona.  I am always frightened I am a disappointment in real life.  It’s easy to be witty when you have twenty-four hours to think of a response.   He belonged to a company QA had just bought weeks earlier.  How strange that we should meet at an unrelated event.

The sponsors had laid on sandwiches and drinks.  Melissa shoved a camcorder in my hand.

“Record interviews with people.  Take film of people.  Tonight you can edit them into a blog video.”

“Right, sure, okay.”  Right, because I had so much experience of interviewing people.  Sure, I knew how to operate a camcorder.  Okay, I’ll pick up the editing software in a trice.

And I did.  I was quickly learning that there was no rank, no job demarcation on board the bus.  You mucked in with everyone else.

We left the university at seven-thirty in order to catch the train that would take the bus under the channel and on to Brussels.  We had been joined by the other driver, who, to keep the confusion down, was also called Dave.  Our hosts had insisted on buying us proper fish and chips with mushy peas for our journey.  A crowd lined the path as we entered the bus, and we had to stand at the door and wave as a galaxy of flash guns recorded our presence.  So this was what it was like to have groupies.  I could get used to this.

After the events of Greenwich, the atmosphere in the bus was euphoric.  For British people to gather around the bus to applaud us was a feat in itself.  We demolished the fish and chips as we swapped triumphant war stories.  Even a broken demo and a presenter forgetting to switch off his phone and receiving two messages in the middle of his demonstration were turned into jokes for the audience.  I won’t say who it was that did that, but it was Tjeerd.  We high-fived each other, possibly only the second time in my life I have high-fived.  I felt awkward, like the only dad at a disco.  It is not in an Englishman’s nature to high-five.

Melissa wanted some photos uploaded from her card.

“I have a card reader built into my laptop,“ I said, ever helpful.  She gave me the card and I placed it into the slot.  It went in.  And in.  And in.  In so far that I could not pull it out.  I borrowed a pair of tweezers from Liberty.  Skilfully I used them to push the damn card further in.  I panicked.  I asked Dave the Driver if he had a precision screwdriver.  He laughed in my face.  He was a bus driver.  Did I want a wheel wrench instead?  But he did produce a screwdriver sufficient to remove the one hundred and twenty-seven screws that held my laptop together.  Well, okay, I stopped counting after twenty, but it was about that.  It was no good.  The card reader was underneath the motherboard, and looked to be a sealed unit.

Melissa reappeared.  She was not happy with me, I could tell.  It was my problem.  I would solve the problem.  She towered over me, despite only being three feet six inches tall.  Inspiration struck.  I unclipped the chain from my tea ball and straightened the wire hook.  Then I - what?  A tea ball.  Then I – no, surely everyone has a tea ball.  No?  Okay, it’s a wire mesh ball on a chain, about the size of a golf ball.  You fill it with the tea of your choice, in my case green Earl Grey, and use it as a reusable tea bag.  So, then I poked around inside the slot, trying to tease the card from outside its hidey-hole.

“I mean, it was obviously too small for the slot.  Why did you push it in when it was obviously too small?”

“Well, it’s never stopped me in the past.”

“Stop being a wise-ass and get the damned thing out.”

I renewed my efforts.  After five minutes Melissa demanded my laptop, and within seconds grasped the offending chip in her hands.  She left for the upper deck, her hands making strange throttling gestures.  Could it be that I had finally met a woman immune to the Simms charm?

I spent the rest of the evening and beyond, editing video clips and writing blogs in the company of Tjeerd.  Not that we were great company for each other, both buried in our laptops.  The path of a nerd is a lonely one, young Skywalker.

Sometime past midnight I went upstairs to retire for the night.  Dave the Driver called for my passport before I hit my bunk.  He sat in the upper rear lounge with the other Dave (that’s Dave the French-Canadian, not the other Dave the Driver.  Who do you think was driving the bus?) and Melissa.

“Damn!” I exclaimed, eyes wide with horror.  “I knew there was something I had forgotten.”

Melissa glared at me.  “You are joking!” she said, in exactly the tone of voice someone uses immediately before throwing a body from a moving vehicle.

“Yes, I am actually.”  I grinned and produced my passport for Dave the Driver from my pocket.

It was funny.  Everyone laugh now.  Please?  Maybe just a smile?

“This is the idiot that stuffed my SD card into his laptop and couldn’t get it out,“ Melissa told Dave the Driver.  “Yet I managed it in seconds.”

“That’s because you’re so much better at everything than I am,“ I said.  Was that a hint of a smile?  “Hey, I’ve got a great idea.  Tomorrow, let’s start afresh.”

Finally she smiled and gave me a thumbs up.

And so to bed.

I had the bottom bunk near the front of the bus.  When I say bottom bunk, it was perhaps three inches from the floor.  The only way I could get into bed was to lie in the passageway and shuffle sideways.  The ceiling was inches from my nose.  I was under strict instructions from She Who Must Be Obeyed to wear pyjamas.  Lying in my coffin, curtains pulled closed, it was relatively easy to shuck of my trousers and pull on my pyjama bottoms.  It’s not so easy to take your top off, though, as I could hardly raise my head, never mind sit up.  I managed it in a series of wiggles and shuffles and pulled my PJ top on at least as far as my chest.  My socks, though, were beyond reach.  I just did not have the room to raise my knees far enough to reach them.

Oh well, I would leave them on.  It would remind me of my single days when courting.  A gentleman always leaves his socks on.  They’re the most difficult things to find when you’re in a hurry.