Indianapolis Sports Bar

I had a work trip last week to Indiana. Indiana is a pretty desolate place, and I spent the entirety of may days in a crowded, windowless conference room. The makings of a boring post? Perhaps, but there were a few things worth sharing.

During our meetings, I had some mental down-time, while the bankers discussed (in excruciating detail) some aspect or other of the new system that they were implementing. For example, there was about a thirty minute debate on the definition of a branch to them. So I had an opportunity to stretch my brain and write limericks about the trip, which I will use to punctuate this post.

Ben in front of the RCA Dome a couple of hours before game time.

First and foremost, if it weren't for the fact that I was traveling with Tyler, I would have been totally unprepared for the weather. I honestly didn't occur to me that April could still be winter in some places. We had been in the 80s pretty consistently, and I had talked the week before to someone in Cincinnati (pretty much in Indiana, more or less), who was excited about temperatures in the 70s. Therefore, my bag had clothes to wear to meetings, plus short sleeve shirts and shorts.

At work Monday morning, Tyler said something like, "You know that it's going to be freezing there, right?" And was he ever right. We walked around downtown on Monday night, which coincided with the NCAA basketball championship game. It was cloudy and gray. The temperatures were probably in the low 40s, but it felt a lot worse than that, and the wind blew like a sonofabitch. I was in a sweatshirt, jeans, and jacket and still freezing my tail off.

We set up in the Champps sports bar right below where the ESPN pre-game broadcast was taking place:

The building with the purple light is visible in this blurry photo on both the ESPN broadcast and out of the window.

The place was packed with people, all of whom had some affiliation with one of the four Final Four teams. I realized too late that my blue cap made me appear to be a UCLA fan, and I had nothing to indicate that I was a Tiger. I'm sure this cost me an enjoyable bullshit session or two with like minded fans.

The Indiana locals were mostly unattractive, which I mention only to bring me to my first limerick.

Hoosiers' diets include much corn
But they do not produce much porn
Because the women get fat
Who wants to see that?
(This limerick will buy me much scorn)

The bar pretty much cleared out by game time. We started watching the game, without a whole lot of interest. What became more interesting was the lack of good dish washing at the place. The bar back would dunk beer mugs into one tub of water, and then into another. Presumably, the first one included some sort of cleanser, but there was no effort to actually "wash" anything. It was just two dunks, and then back into the cooler. You know the nice frosty coating on your mug at Champps? Rinse water. Nothing more. The most egregious offense was when he was putting a wine glass back into one of those things where the glass hangs upside down. The rinse water was dripping down, so he puckered his lips, and blew all of the excess water away.

At Champps dishes do not get washed
And germs never ever get quashed
The man with the trash
Puts hands in the bath
And spreads filth through the water with a slosh

Appetites quashed, we left during the first half, and walked up to the ESPN set to lookey-loo. Surprisingly, the set was just sitting there empty, and we were able to wander around without anyone saying anything about it. We didn't actually go sit at the desk or anything, but I did steal a copy of their plan for the pre game. You can click on the image to see a bigger copy.
I really like the column that refers to Dick Vitale, Rece Davis, Digger Pheps, etc. as "Talent." I gather that "Page" refers to where the teleprompter should be and that "Segment" refers to some identifier on their stored highlights. There are nine pages in all, but they're all pretty much like this souvenir. That night, Tyler woke up and spent a good bit of time puking. Props to him for pausing to get his camera and take photos. They're pretty gross, but if you're interested in seeing the puke, click here. The meetings were Tuesday and Wednesday, and there's really nothing worth mentioning -- or at least nothing that's both worth mentioning and safe to mention while remaining employed. But I did write three more limericks that were related to the meetings. The first had to do with our arrival.

There wasn't a man in the room
And we got there not too soon
After making them wait
They swallowed their hate
Because mapping of data loomed

One thing that I had been asked to do was to find out why one particular woman always opened support cases to replace their document procedures with new ones.

Amy always asks to replace
Procedures for document space
When new products are made
Data integrity fades
New code is needed in case

And this was penned as the final day was starting feel like a really long one.

My clock says two, I see
No wait, I'm in Eastern, it's three
A half hour more
To trudge through this chore
And it's off to the airport for me