Okay, now the world has gotten one step more complicated. I was doing pretty well with things until I ran into the card/key for the hotel room. Now I know these things have been around a long time and I guess I still suffer from the”barnacle on the side of progress” syndrome. What the heck I still am fascinated with a credit card and buying things on line! So I check in to the hotel on the trip and they give me this card thing and in the first hotel it opened the door by sort of waving it at the door lock. And the door sort of “beeped” at you and unlocked. Now at the second hotel not only does it operate the door it also operates the elevator! But you have to insert the correct way or you end up looking like an idiot with a car full of other people who want the elevator to go in their direction and not someone who is too stupid to use the card properly! Somehow I did not know it was going to be this complex, when did a door become such a challenge? Did I miss a memo or something? I suppose the next thing is bio-metric locks for your hotel room, when you check in they finger print you, issue you a card with your finger print on it and that opens the door. I keep thinking what happened to keys?
Speaking of which, on the train all the SCA had really big keys that seem to open all kinds of secret compartments. When the toilets refused to do their duty on the Coast Starlight, one of the attendants opened a big door some where near to the rest rooms and messed with some switches and they all flushed again- the magic of the big keys. Some how on this particular train car or cars the electrical systems seemed to be a bit of a problem and that is why it was late out the gate at the Union Depot in Los Angeles. The key business wasn’t the only thing I noticed about the personel on the train, they all seemed to have lots of equipment hanging off their persons, badges, cell phones, walkie-talkies, and other stuff.
One time the train stopped and it seemed to be in some isolated spot in the mountains and then it backed up and there was the conductor out side the train! I was wondering what he had done. I had heard that they put people off the train for doing something that was forbidden, like smoking, which they
frown on, I was wondering what the heck the conductor had done that we were leaving him on the side of the track. It turned out that he had to manually throw a switch that malfunctioned when it was signaled to change electronically.
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