As I type this I’m sat in a hotel room in London. The same hotel that I was thrown out of this morning along with my colleague.

What had we done? Absolutely nothing except to rely on on our company to properly book us a hotel for a week whilst we are on a training course. Fortunately I have friends in London and if worst came to worse I’d go and bed down with them – however I can’t really offer my friends floor space to someone they don’t know.

In this thought my company has no blame. It would appear that we use the services of a third party to book our hotel, travel, etc so after 3.5hrs on a train, the last thing you want to be told is that you don’t have a room. My colleague was all for getting back on the train and heading home. Fortunately the hotel had space last night but not for the rest of the week – so we turned up at the training centre with suitcases, etc in tow only to be told later that the 3rd party had “persuaded” the hotel (Travelodge as a by the by) that they do indeed have room for us and if necessary they would have to turf other folks out!

It all boiled down to the 3rd party having clout and my employer having a potential 40,000 employees that they could have staying at this hotel chain and that is business nobody in their right mind would want to do away with. So we turned up at the check in desk to have a suitably humbled duty manager welcome us back – though not that humbled that he didn’t offer any concessions or similar!

Ah well, the course is so far enjoyable and will help cement knowledge, etc – for those of a min, it is the “Securing Networks with ASA Firewalls” course from Cisco all shiny and new with the exam only having been available for a month or two.

More next week, maybe.