After the success of my first „business“ trip to an auction, where I bought the computers and servers I needed for about a third of their real price, I was sent to another one, this time officially. I had a shopping list (25 computers, 23 monitors, a hub, a switch, a projector, 3 colour laser printers etc...) Surprisingly, I managed to buy everything. The funny part was when 20 computers came up for sale and nobody was in much of a hurry to bid, because it was obvious that out of twenty there'd be one for everybody. So I bid the highest and they ask me how many I want. They didn't expect the kid in a T-shirt and dirty jeans to want more than one, and whoops. The kid bought them all:).
Then various folks kept coming up to me asking whether I really needed all 20 and whether I'd sell one of them on:). I wouldn't. I bought $19,000 worth of stuff (a good three quarters of a million crowns) and I felt terribly important. The laughter stopped when it hit me that I also had to pick it all up, load it into a car and deliver it to the right places.
I did have a car for it, and that was the shock of this morning. I flew into Los Angeles and had a car reserved with Hertz (car rental). It was supposed to be a minivan, but it's hard to cram 25 computers into a minivan, especially with 23 17-inch monitors. So they'd lend me a „normal“ van instead. And me, guilelessly, sure, why not. Just like last time with the limousine. I walk up to it and I'm gasping again. It was a van all right, but the size of a bus and for 17 people! Unfortunately, idiot me didn't bring a camera, so I have no documentation of it. For the first time in my life I had to jump down from the seat when getting out, and it was quite a deep drop:). Also for the first time in my life I was looking into truckers' cabs and not just up their nostrils, like from a regular car.
Luckily I got hold of one of my helpers (I have one „subordinate“ in every building) and the next day the two of us hauled and delivered everything.
Before I flew home on Friday. I also gave him the task of setting up all those computers on the appropriate desks, and I'd fly in afterwards and just install everything. I naively thought two days would be enough for that. Yesterday I came back after a week of installing and next week I have to go there once more...
But let me not get ahead of myself, one thing at a time. So on Friday we delivered everything and I flew home for the weekend. On Monday I was supposed to fly back, so in the morning I asked Mary to book me a ticket for noon and started tinkering with something. Luckily it's just a short hop from the office to the airport, so when I finally tore myself away it was 11:45, our finance director threw me into his Landcruiser and I still made it.
In Los Angeles I had a car booked again, this time a full-size car, i.e. „full-fat“. The girl says the full-fat ones are gone, so they'll give me a premium for the same price. I pictured another ocean liner in which I'd look like a grandpa on his way to see the grandkids, and besides, I thought to myself, I'm going to the desert! So I cheekily asked whether they had any off-roaders and the girl said yes. So I picked (and boy, did I do well) a Jeep. I walk up to it, a 3-month-old Jeep Grand Cherokee, 2000 miles on the clock, a car worth a good 2.5 million crowns!
So I get in and head onto the highway and at that moment I was gripped by an unconquerable feeling of importance, pride, success or whatever, driving around America in this car where everything is electronic and leather and smart.... I had to rein myself in. The car isn't mine, they still pay me next to nothing (the visa still hasn't come) and I live in an old flat with a bunch of other people so that we can pay the rent, so what success are we talking about.
Back to that Jeep, which I still miss. I had it on loan for a whole week and ever since then every other car feels like a mangy tin can. It had computer-controlled 4x4 drive, so when you hit the gas or the brake in a corner on a lousy surface, the computer distributes the power to the wheels so the car doesn't go into a skid and the engine's power is used to the max. Of course the driver doesn't even notice. A CD player, a tape deck and a radio, and with eight speakers it rattled the windows of the nearest houses. The engine, a V8, 5.2 litres, 380 horses, ate like a herd of 380 horses. Especially off-road. Oh well, I'm not paying for it, right... Loads of silly things, like the lights coming on when it gets dark, + and – buttons on the steering wheel (that's when you get bored of pressing the gas on the highway, you set your cruising speed and then just adjust it with the buttons) and so on.
Since one of the hospitals is in the desert, I set off straight away to install some computers there, so that in the afternoons I could head out into the desert and compare the Jeep with the Patrol I used to plough through the Sahara in Libya. It was like comparing water and sand. No matter what I did, bouncing over rocks, scrambling up cliffs, jumping over dunes, inside the Jeep it was still as quiet and comfy as on the sofa in your living room. You'd expect that if you get a two-and-a-half-tonne colossus up to 80 on bumpy sand and then yank the wheel with all your might and slam the brake, you might, like, get into a skid. Not a chance. I never managed to throw it off balance, it always stopped, turned or pulled away as if I were driving home from dance class on a dry road. At one point I thought I'd finally got it, when I was climbing a sandy rock with it and it simply wouldn't go any further. So I stopped to take a photo of it in that faux-paux situation. I carefully put on the brake and got out. I shouldn't have done that. Not that the car rolled off the rock, it was me who slid a good way down on my backside and had huge trouble climbing back up that rock to the door! It simply climbs more than a person is able to climb on all fours. In the end I managed to get up that rock-hill in the desert and I wanted to photograph the car on top from below, the way you see it in ads for off-roaders. Unfortunately I wasn't able to climb down the rock. And on top of that I got scared that there was no way to drive this thing back down. It barely made it up, but going down it'll simply roll over. And I'll be paying it off till I die. Sure, I paid extra for insurance, but I doubt it covers mountaineering:).
In the end driving down was even easier than climbing up. I just put it in low first gear and drove down slowly. I even managed to take a photo of the view through the windscreen. It was about midnight already, but you can see something there. Of course you can't tell the angle from the photos, so it doesn't look nearly as terrifying.
The next day I was telling Rae how I'd been tearing around the desert and how much I liked it, and she said she had something even better for me. I couldn't imagine that, but she was right. A motorbike with four wheels, made specially and solely for tearing around off-road, sure, it doesn't have leather seats and a stereo, but it weighs just a few kilos and so with half-deflated tyres it'll climb ABSOLUTELY anywhere.
The beginning was rough. She says she'll drive, I should sit behind her. The bike is a single-seater, I didn't want to press up against her too much (after all, she's got a fifteen-year-old daughter and her husband was there:)), so I sat quite far back on the rack. Which shifted the centre of gravity from the middle to the rear, and on the first almost vertical rock, where Rae wanted to show me how nicely it climbs, we tipped over. So before I even had the handlebars in my hands, I already had both arms bloodied and scraped up to the elbows:(. But I was a hero and on we went through black swamps, past white cliffs. When the handlebars finally got into my hands, I immediately knew what toy I'd be asking mum for next Christmas. A Honda 350 quad, desert spec, mum:).
At night I also took the Jeep for a drive through the desert, I put on my all-time favourite CD, U2 – Joshua Tree, which fitted Joshua Tree National Park perfectly. In the morning I unfortunately discovered that those cacti had badly scratched the green metallic paint. So again I was picturing how I'd be paying it off till I die. Luckily it washed off.
The rest of the week was more work than fun, but I still enjoyed driving the Jeep, even if only on highways and in towns. Altogether I clocked up about 1000km in it... Oh well... Now this doesn't seem so rad to me anymore: