Went Down South

Last week I traveled down to south central South Dakota -- working the Chamberlain, Platte, and Miller areas. I get to Chamberlain fairly often as we have an agent there with quite a few of our accounts. I did inspections with cities, counties, and schools mostly, but also a couple of service shops. Nothing too exciting or interesting.

I don't really like school property inspections. Other than the fact that most are fairly large, schools tend to have a lot of architectural features and built ins that take a lot of time to document. Adding to that, my predecessor didn't do the best work and has a lot of mistakes -- meaning that I basically have to redo all measuring and documentation.

I had never been to Platte before. Platte is sort of a Dutch community so naturally I felt right at home. No, not really. It is a Dutch community but is pretty much like any other small town. Apparently there is a man there with exactly the same name as my brother, Doug. Yes, the last name too!

On Thursday night I stayed in Miller, SD. There is a small hotel that is sort of a dive and then there is a major chain hotel that is sort of a dive. I stayed at the chain because I get points. The hotel is owned by Indians. Indians from India, not American Indians or Native Americans.

I had a communication problem at check-in, but I did understand when she handed me my room card and said, "Room two-terty-two." I've never had Indian food but I think the hallways smelled of it. Maybe the food tastes good but the smell in the hallways wasn't the greatest.

After bringing my stuff up to the room, I started setting up and plugging in all my equipment. That is when I noticed this nice feature. Most hotels have bedside wall-mounted lamps with plug-ins. I don't know what happened but in this instance the cord is wired directly to the outlet behind the cover plate. Very much not up to electrical code. I'm considering contacting the corporate office just because I'm sensitive about electrical issues. The code is written the way it is for a reason and that is generally because at some point something bad happened and they figured out that, hey, maybe we shouldn't allow this to be done. The saying is that OSHA codes are written in blood.

I sat in this chair but I did not do this! Yuck, right?