Wrong Plug
So there was a conference in Manchester, UK with many international colleagues to celebrate the “next generation” of the Breakthrough Listen project (i.e. continued funding from the foundation beyond the original ten year scope and a new partnership with Oxford). More specifically, we were to be hanging out at the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) headquarters talking about what we’ve done and what’s next.
The SKA is a consortium of many host countries working together on large radio telescope arrays in Australia and South Africa. The other partner countries include: China, France, India, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
I arrived at the hotel all exhausted from the long journey, fixing to take a nap and charge all my devices. I pulled out my UK plug adaptor and the stupid thing wasn’t fitting in the wall. I soon realized I only brought my South African adaptor, which is similar enough to easily cause confusion, but different enough to be utterly useless. Dammit!
Infuriated with myself I failed to get any sleep. A loud pack of unsupervised children running up and down the hall didn’t help. So I settled for just powering through until tonight.
I grew concerned as I have a talk tomorrow with the presentation on my laptop. I also needed to practice and make edits tonight and currently didn’t have enough charge to handle all that. I contacted my teammates but nobody had a spare adaptor available.
Went out to dinner with a couple folks. Enjoyed the restaurant but there wasn’t really much else going on in this part of Manchester. I walked around in the cold rain a long time trying to find any kind of open shop that would carry travel adaptors. No such luck.
I got back to the hotel soaked and annoyed and not really sure exactly how I’ll make it through tomorrow. I reckoned somebody would let me borrow a plug during the day to keep my phone and laptop alive but until then I had to make it through the night on almost dead batteries.
We all arrived at the SKA headquarters and waited in line to register for temporary security badges. We had to enter our personal info on a touch screen. Note how the United States wasn’t in the partner list above, so the pull down menu for “country of origin” didn’t contain the United States, and we had to clumsily tap it in character by character. How humiliating! Serves us Yankee fuckers right, no?
However Canada was on the list, and so the headquarters had Canadian style power outlets everywhere among those of the other partner countries. Of course Canada plugs are the same as the U.S. so.. I was saved! All my previous anxiety and effort failing to find a charging solution was for naught. Thank you, Canada!