Three Days In Orlando (well, at Disney World)

Hi everyone! Guess where I was this past week? Orlando friggin’ Florida, that’s where! Why was I in Orlando? The same reason as everyone else: Disney World!!! Actually, I was there for a conference. No, seriously! Here’s the brochure:

http://digbro.com/entry/index.cfm?user_id=5149&l=0&r=0&c_id=&getFl=1&fl_id=1

And on page 2, look who, under Exports, was going to give the presentation on ‘Know your customer, your customer’s end use and applicable end use restrictions’? Me, that’s who!! I was so excited.

The trip started out at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport which, last time I checked, claimed it had flights to more cities than San Antonio did. My co-worker Barry and I were going to take a Southwest flight direct to Orlando late in the afternoon. I didn’t realize until we were about to board that the reason about a third of the passengers were under the age of twelve was that it was the first weekend of Spring Break and everybody was headed to Disney World. Seriously, everybody, even the two adults I was scrunched in between on the last row of the plane. Barry and I were among the last to board and, having not been on a Southwest flight in a while, I wasn’t sure what the availability would be of a cherished window seat. Barry got on before me and took the first aisle seat he came upon, somewhere in the middle of the plane. I couldn’t tell what was open in the back and figured, what the heck, I’d go check it out and learn something. Well, what I learned is that if you’re one of the last people to get on the plane, get the first available middle seat you see, particularly if it is between two small or thin people. As it turned out, I got the middle seat on the very last row of the plane between a smallish lady and a guy who must have weighed at least 275 lbs. You could tell he’d gone to the back first so as to lessen his chances of having someone sit next to him. The feeling was mutual buddy, lemme tell ya. Southwest’s seats feel very small but I guess that’s what we pay for. Anyway, both of my seatmates were going to Disney World. The guy was actually going to meet his family who had driven all the way from Corpus Christi. The drive was supposed to only take two days but took three due to all the traffic they kept encountering and not just in big city rush hour. I told them I was going to Disney World for a conference and their response was to laugh at me, ha!

Yes, Southwest doesn’t charge for bags. But even without that, their tickets were the cheapest and gave us the best legs. No flying to Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, etc. for us. It was about 2 hours and 20 minutes direct to Orlando and on the way back we would have a layover in Houston which is pretty much on the way as the crow flies anyway. I was disappointed though that the baggage handlers didn’t come out and wave at us while we were taxiing away from the terminal. Oh, and the flight attendants were boring. C’mon Southwest, you’re supposed to be fun to fly!

The flight was rather uneventful and we landed in quite windy weather in sunny Orlando. Feeling particularly thankful to be alive after a somewhat iffy landing, I led an impromptu round of applause for the pilots that sounded like it was only taken up by a few people in the back of the plane. I don’t care. I think we should applaud every time we land in high wind or low visibility. Of course, I was a bit emboldened by being in the very back so no one could see who was starting the clapping.

To get to the Contemporary Resort at Disney World, we were going to take Mickey’s Magical Express which is actually just a big metal-plated bus. Our driver was Fernando Rocha, a Cuban-looking guy whose English was decent but pronounced ‘firework’ as ‘fi-wer’ and was sometimes quite incomprehensible. We were bombarded the whole fifty-minute drive by video of Disney World attractions and random songs from old Disney films. The speaker directly above my seat was so loud I was tempted to go up to my buddy Fernando and ask him how to turn it off but I decided not to so that I didn’t ruin any little kid’s Disney experience.

One thing I noticed on the drive to Disney World is that, in many peoples’ backyards, they have swimming pools which are in a mesh-looking enclosure, presumably to keep out mosquitoes. They’re directly attached to the houses allowing for easy mosquito-free access. Seemed a bit ugly but definitely quite functional. That’s what you get when you build your city on a swamp I guess. As one guy put it during the conference, he couldn’t understand living in Florida if you weren’t by the ocean.

Fernando dropped off passengers at the Wilderness Lodge, the Grand Floridian (where porters were dressed in vintage-1920s get-ups including knee-high socks and white derby caps) and finally the Contemporary. Barry and I could’ve stayed someplace much cheaper outside of the park but that would have required us to either rent a car or take transportation for a half hour or more to get to the conference. Therefore, we used a little more of the company’s money to stay onsite. There are certainly also benefits to being able to immediately run back to your room to check your e-mail. And, since the Disney monorail runs right through it, it’s easy to catch it and get to the Magic Kingdom or Epcot Center.

That reminds me: I didn’t go inside any of the parks but it’s my professional opinion that the only difference between Disney World and more pedestrian theme parks is that Disney has a) better licensable characters and b) this weird thing about ‘magic’. Then again, I’m also 31 years old so maybe I should leave the magic to the kiddies.

Barry and I arrived at the resort around 7:30, too late to register for the conference and late enough for us to be fairly hungry (Little Debbie oatmeal creme pies are only so sustaining). We checked into the hotel, found our room on the 10th floor (though the room# was 4646...what makes Disney so special they can’t have the room# start with the number of the floor?) and then went to find the California Grill to eat dinner. The Grill was on the top floor of the resort (15th) and we wanted a good view of the 10pm fireworks over the Magic Kingdom. To get to the restaurant, you have to take a separate elevator from the second floor which has a sign next to it stating that business casual attire is required. We were wearing jeans but they let us through anyway. Upon arriving up top, we were asked if we had reservations. Reservations? Uh oh. No, we hadn’t. OK, that’s fine we were told. We could order off the menu while sitting at very small two-person tables (all of which were taken) or order at the bar. Fine, we’ll do the bar. It was then that the bartender, from Glasgow, Scotland, gave us the menu. Appetizers were $10-20 and entreés averaged around $35. Uh oh. Oh well...Barry and I didn’t know where else to go and what the heck, most of our other meals during the conference were taken care of. I still ordered only appetizers though as entreés in these expensive restaurants usually are much smaller than you need to actually fill yourself up. Call it the paradox of expensive dining. I don’t understand it either.

We were later informed that to have reserved a table we would’ve needed to have called six months ago. Wow.

We hung around long enough until, just before 10pm, we wandered out onto the balcony. The view was great but it was about 50 degrees, the wind was blowing and my jacket was in the room. Who’d think that the first time I’d be truly cold this winter would be in Orlando, Florida? Fireworks are nice but they’re not worth freezing your tail off so after about five minutes I bid Barry adieu and went back inside and went to sleep.

Now one interesting thing about this trip was that, being away from the Graham cracker, I would be able to sleep through the night unbothered. Thankfully Jennifer’s mom was staying with her while I was gone but I still felt a little guilty. I must’ve felt more guilty than I’d thought because I woke up three times during the night. Of course, each time I remembered that I didn’t have any diapers to change so I immediately went back to sleep.

The next morning Barry and I headed over to the Conference, a fun and productive affair consisting of about 600 of our fellows in trade compliance. A great many of them have been around each other long enough so that each ICPA conference is a reunion; Barry and I are getting to that point which makes each conference easier to attend. It really stinks to go somewhere and not recognize anybody but now not only did we know all the Austin people that were there (well, all three of them) but also a bunch of people from all over the country. Nevermind that we met a bunch of them at last year’s ping pong tournament at the ICPA conference in Anaheim, eh!

My presentation was going to be at 3pm on Monday, the first day of the conference. This was a prime spot because I couldn’t spend the whole conference worrying about my presentation but also afterward people would recognize me as the guy who presented on ‘know your customer’ and could more easily initiate conversations. ICPA is big enough so that there are five presentations going on at once giving everyone plenty of options to learn something. The lady presenting before me, the Global Trade Compliance Manager at Weatherford, an oil services company, was presenting on training, a subject I knew a lot about, to a packed house with people standing in the back. This was what I wanted to have happen to me. I wanted to be big-time within the trade compliance field and giving a presentation at ICPA wasn’t enough for me; I needed to be popular.

I wasn’t popular. Well, I was popular among the forty or so attendees at my presentation. My presentation was detailed and exactly what they were looking for; even my buddy from Dell was furiously taking notes. I did a good job presenting though I didn’t feel totally in my element, partially because I hadn’t totally memorized my slides but also because, due to the placement of the projector on a table and the screen in the corner of the room, I couldn’t move around as freely as I’d wanted. But I didn’t have the packed, standing-room-only crowd of 120-140 people I was hoping for. There were many intelligent questions and I used up one hour and fifteen minutes of the hour and a half I was allotted. I felt good but I didn’t have the elation that I’ve often felt after giving a great presentation.

Still, I’d accomplished my objectives. I’d given a presentation at what I feel is the best minute-for-minute trade compliance conference around. I’d put NI’s name up there with other much more well-known companies. I’d received a couple of good ideas in return that I could use to bolster NI’s compliance program. And, perhaps most importantly, I’d given a presentation that I would’ve killed to have heard three years ago, a presentation that many of my colleagues at other companies could use to say to their management something along the lines of “If podunk National Instruments is doing this we should too”.

As a side note, I did get several people come up to me later in the conference to talk about how much they learned from the presentation and requested some follow-up documents and such. One of them was the trade compliance manager for ITT, a major defense contractor who was assessed the largest fine to date for violating the Export Administration Regulations, a big fat $100 million fine for actively helping the Chinese government develop night-vision technology. I told him I’d used his company in some of my presentations before, eh! I’m sure he’s never heard that one before.

That night Barry and I were free, i.e. there were no vendors taking us out to dinner. Well, I had one offer but decided that I would prefer to lay low and catch up on my sleep. I rode the monorail around to Epcot, then came back and had a very, very crummy pizza (not quite Hungarian crummy but crummy nonetheless) at the café in the resort before watching Children of Men on the laptop in my room (fabulous movie). Afterward, I felt rested, refreshed and super-charged enough to check e-mail for an hour and then go to sleep around 11:30. Barry, on the other hand, went and rode roller coasters in the Magic Kingdom for five hours and went to bed at 12:30am.

The next day was uneventful at the conference. We were taken out to dinner, along with a bunch of other folks, to a Roy’s Hawaiian Fusion restaurant by one of our vendors. Being taken out for expensive dinners is always nice but you sometimes wonder if they couldn’t save some money and lower their prices. Then again, with so many vendors taking people out to eat, it’s like an arms race; no one wants to be the one who went chintzy on the meal. So we all get taken out to some very swank places. The dinners are also good places to meet other trade compliance people and get ideas but usually there are so many people it gets wayyyy too loud to be easily heard which drives me crazy but oh well. We were gone for almost five hours and when you’ve enjoyed being away that long it was a success.

The next day at the conference also went well. The last session finished at 2:30 so Barry and I walked back to the hotel lobby to wait for the Mickey’s Magical Express to show up. The resort allowed us to get our boarding passes and check our luggage right there which was quite convenient. We had an opportunity to share a cab with two ladies from another company but since the ride would cost $70 total I turned it down since our bus ride was already paid for. I’d put up with the videos again in order not to have to add any additional items to our expense reports.

We were dropped off at Orlando International Airport by good ‘ol Mickey. The airport is international because, get this, there are flights from Dublin, Glasgow, London, Amsterdam, Frankfort, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Sao Paulo and numerous Central American cities. How many of those flights would be around if it weren’t for Disney World? I’ll bet none.

For the flight to Houston Barry and I both had high seating numbers so I snagged a window in the fourth row of the plane, just in front of the wing which is where I love to be. My seatmate in the middle seat was Ural, a professor at Texas Southern University who was in town for a social work conference. He has the distinction of being the first person ever to be interested, along with me, about where we were in the air as we descended over Galveston Island and came up I-45 to land at Hobby Airport. If I have to fly into Houston, I much prefer Hobby as it’s smaller and more scenic to descend into.

A couple of hours later we caught our flight to Austin which was at least half full with people coming to SXSW. The flight was only 29 minutes and I always wonder why they bother to serve drinks on those short flights is beyond me. I didn’t order one out of principle, eh. I was sort of able to track where we were in the air though by the time I realized we’d hit Columbus and La Grange I’d thought we were still in the Houston suburbs, eh. An uneventful landing, getting our luggage, finding my car in the airport parking lot F and driving home and that was it. Next year: Phoenix, Arizona!