This Wednesday I flew up to New Jersey to meet with some people from our human pharmaceutical division. My main meetings were with the Data Management group. I also got to meet with the eCRF development group, clinical coding group, and archive group. We had some really good meetings and my group came back with a lot of ideas that we want to implement in Animal Health. Since most people here complain when I talk about computers I am sure everyone would be bored to death hearing about processes involved with the handling of clinical data so I will leave it at we had a great meeting.
Wednesday night Bryan, Wesley and I decided to take a train into New York city to have dinner and look around. We were staying in Newark NJ which is right on the border so we figured we would have about a 20 minute train ride. Turns out we were wrong, we had a 1 hour train ride into Penn Station so by they time we got there we were starving. When we first got there we thought we were in for a long night because it took us a little bit just to figure out how to get out of the station. Luckily once we got out the rest of the night was easy.
We found a little hole in the wall pizza place for dinner. We almost got thrown out before we even got to eat because none of us could understand the guy behind the counter. He kept asking Bryan if we were eating there or taking it with us, but Bryan couldn’t understand him and the guy was getting mad. Finally we figured out what he was asking and he calmed down and, reluctantly, allowed us to stay. The pizza there was really good, although it may just have been that I was so hungry at that point that anything would have been good. After dinner we walked up Broadway, through Time Square and over to Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree. We lucked out on our way back because the train was running late and we were just able to make it. If we would have missed that train we would have had to wait a hour for the next train and wouldn’t have made it back until midnight. We had a lot of fun walking around but I think you would have to be crazy to want to live there, there was WAY too many people.
We were done at 1:30 on Thursday and headed back to the airport. Our drive over turned out to be foreshadowing to how the rest of the day was going to go. I am pretty sure our driver kept falling asleep because we were all over the road the whole way back. He almost smashed one car into the barriers but luckily they were able to avoid us.
Our flight was suppose to be at 5 so we had a while after we got in there. At about 3 I noticed that they had changed the status of our flight to canceled at the gate, although no one ever said anything. We went up to the counter and they were able to get us on another flight but it was suppose to be leaving at 2:40 and it was all the way in another terminal (remember it was 3 at the time) so we asked if we were going to make the flight. The girl said “you have a few minutes, hurry and you will make it”. So we hop on a bus to the other terminal, hurry down to the gate to see closed doors. We asked the guy at the gate and he looked at us like we were crazy and said that the plane hadn’t even left Boston yet and that the flight time was change to 5:50. Good, we made it. So we were sitting there and they changed the departure time to 6:50 (again not telling anyone, we just saw it). Then at about 5 or so the board showed that our gate had changed, but no one said anything (are you starting to get the trend?). Once we got over to the new gate we were settled until we left. At 7:30 we finally got on the plane and I thought everything was going to be good. That was until the guy sitting next to me got on. He was so big that even with the seat belt all the way out he had to suck in and push as hard as he could to get his seat belt buckled. Being so big meant that he took up all of his seat, part of mine and part the other guy sitting next to him. Now I barley fit in those seats myself so this meant that I was hanging out in the isle the whole way back and was beat up by everyone that waked buy and by the drink cart the whole way back. Our flight was to Charlotte so once we made it back I still had a 2 hour drive left and didn’t make it home until midnight so I was exhausted.
Other than our trip back it was a great trip. I took a couple of pictures while we were in New York if anyone wants to see: http://picasaweb.google.com/sanders1745/NewYorkCity# .
