London Series: Room Service at Sheraton Skyline

Despite the perceived excitement of managing projects with remote teams and having to travel often to different sites, all I can say that it’s not as glamorous as it seems. For sure, there are benefits & opportunities to this job but sometimes it really takes a lot out of me. I am not sure if I can do this for life. Here is how it was like one of the days I was in London.

I was already struggling trying to keep up with a highly technical 8-hour training course each day. Mind you, the course starts at about midnight Vancouver time — a time when I should be soundly asleep in bed.

Needless to say, it’s hard trying to stay awake sometimes. I must have taken something like 10 cups of coffee over the course of the day. I tell myself this is bad for me but I could not help it. After a couple of days, I was really sick of the coffee from the machine in the training rooms and bought “real ones” from the cafeteria.

Right after that training, there were three conference calls that I need to get on. That three conference calls took a total of 4 hours with the first one starting at 6:00 PM (LON time) and the last one completed at midnight. I stayed in the office the whole time because I did not want to take conference calls with my cell or the hotel — it would have been enormously expensive to do so. Moreover I always need to take conference calls hands free.

I did not even get the chance to grab dinner because the cafeteria had already closed. That one day was a really long one. At least the calls that day were “easy” ones — ones that I was not beaten up on. :-)

By the time I got back to my room, I was famished. All the restaurants are closed at that time and what I had available is the hotel’s room service. There were not much choice on the menu — just pizza and grills. The Grilled Beef Sirloin Steak sounded good … 10 oz some more … just what I needed.

When I called for my order, they told me “it’ll be 30 minutes” … what?!? 30 minutes? That was a long wait for me. Good thing I had some cookies in my bag.

They gave me a choice of sauce but I just can’t remember what it is now. I only remembered that what I selected was some uncommon sauce … perhaps something like peppermint something … I can’t remember.

Here it is again … ketchup and … English Mustard for condiments. BTW, English mustards are different from North America mustards … the colour looked slightly different and with English mustard you can see “stuff” (ground pepper?) in them.

The steak sure was not disappointing at all. It was like … wow! Perfect medium rare; just the way I always liked my steak. This whole thingy costs 24 GBP — quite reasonable I think, considering.

There were some work I needed to deliver out from the conference calls but I just couldn’t stay awake anymore. Anyway, even if I did it over the night, those guys in Atlanta and Vancouver would have already gone for the day.