Blooper Reel

It wouldn't be a proper trip without some sort of mess, so here, for your amusement, is the Chicago Blooper Reel:

• The hard drive in Adam's gaming laptop died, forcing him to re-download his games (WoW and SWTOR) so that he could raid as promised.  This took like, 2 days.  Seriously.
• Google gave us some crazy-ass directions to the hotel, so we wound up doing 3 or 4 loops around downtown Chicago before we figured out how to get to the place.  I haven't dealt with real city traffic for some time, so Adam was utterly delighted by my squeals of protest every single time he slammed on the brake.
• The hotel was apparently completely baffled by Adam's declaration that he wanted to pay for our room in cash, so they put the entire amount on his credit card, running it up to the limit.
• Adam's credit union was basically offline most of the week, so he couldn't pay off his credit card.  Fortunately, he prepared by bringing a bunch of cash, otherwise we'd have been in some serious difficulty.
• Adam forgot to leave me any cash on Sunday, so I didn't get to eat until 7pm and was consequently Grumpy As All Heck.  We then went to a steakhouse that smelled of damp carpet and they attempted to foist fried, breaded chicken fingers on me as some kind of upscale meal.
• The Dell guy showed up to put a new hard drive in Adam's computer, which he did do.  However, he couldn't be bothered to map the new drive in (or simply didn't know how) so Adam had to do that.
• SWTOR decided to bug out and force another re-download of the ENTIRE GAME on the hotel's incredibly slow "broadband".  At this point I was starting to think he would have been better off just canceling his gaming for the week.
• I clogged up our toilet and had to call maintenance to un-clog it.  The guy they sent would not even make eye contact.  So embarrassed.  So, of course, Adam spent the entire rest of the trip teasing me about it.
• Google's incredibly messed-up social media platform thing broke for no apparent reason right when my game was supposed to start.  It then "fixed" itself.  Kinda.  No clue what that was all about except it was spectacularly annoying.
• Adam went out of his way to find this one particular sushi buffet restaurant in Indianapolis when we were on our way back.  Except they were closed when we got there.
• Probably some random stuff I forgot.

We are SO organized. At least I didn't leave the notebook containing my novel first draft in the convention center or anything like that.  Nobody was seriously injured or robbed.  It's all good.