What is this, a freak out?

So my company has these trips they send engineers on. Clients hire us to provide temporary, round-the-clock tech support while they're going through a new installation or major upgrade. True, it wouldn't usually be the most effective use of an engineer's time. But their position (and I would tend to agree) is that at some point, all software engineers should have to sit and watch people actually trying to use their software.

The practical upshot of all this is that I spent a week in York, PA working 12-hour night shifts, wandering a gigantic hospital looking for users with problems. After a while, you enter an altered state of consciousness and the hours just fly by. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone on a particularly regular basis. The consequences to your sanity might be... unfortunate.

On the bright side, I know a heck of a lot more about how hospitals actually work than I used to. Which, working at a company that makes software for health care, is probably a good thing. But I probably could have accomplished the same thing on an eight hour shift rotation...

The one good thing about York? It was just a few miles down the road from Hershey. If there's a heaven, I hope it's a lot like Hershey. The whole town smells like chocolate all the time. And at 25 cents a bar, it's dirt cheap. I brought back a couple of cases worth. If you ever find yourself in the Baltimore/Harrisburg area, I would highly recommend the trip.