The reason I was there in the 1st place

My recent traumatic travels to Belgium and the US did actually have a purpose - although it was difficult to remember it at the time - when I was trying to get to Brussels - or when I had to spend an unexpected night in New York - I was actually there to help my customer test out a new store that they have opening soon. The store itself will be in New York - on Broadway to be precise, but we were doing our testing at a company called 'SMA Microsystems' in Raleigh, North Carolina.

It's a very nice part of the world. I've been before, to visit my friend Tim, who moved out there many years ago, and who has settled out there and made a very nice life for himself. It was nice to go back and see how things have changed - and stayed the same - in 14 years!

My business trip was with 3 of my customer colleagues who I work with back home in Leeds. They were all out there because of their different technical skills, and their focus on different parts of the system. Our basic remit was to get the store set up (40 tills) and run a week's worth of tests to simulate all the combinations of activity which the NY store will do when it goes live.

The facility we were in consisted of a huge warehouse with benches reaching across the open space in the middle - each bench sat about 6 tills on it - we had 2 store servers and 4 workstations and printers - 2 shoogles - the shoe lookup system, and 2 style advisor kiosks. It was a massive set up. The store is going to be huge!

As you can probably see - it's not exactly a 'lab' environment like we have back here in the UK; raised floors and under floor aircon. It literally was a warehouse.

• A big metal box,
• in 90+ degrees of heat,
• and high humidity.
• EEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!!!!!!!

The fomal business wear lasted 1 day. After that we were in shorts (well I had cropped trousers!!)

Needless to say the only thing we could think of once the afternoon started drawing to a close was a cold beer and a shower. In that order.