Last week's meeting marathon was nothing compared to what went down this past week! The technical design and project teams from our partners were all coming into town to have a four day joint design and application review session. This is otherwise known as "Lock-Down" sessions.

A lock-down session is no different than than the series of conference calls we've been having lately. Well, I take that back. The big difference here? These sessions are face-to-face! These are the same bastards I speak to on the phone that I can choose to ignore or mute when I'm not interested in what they have to say. Sure, things get done a lot faster and decisions are made a lot quicker when you're face-to-face but these sessions are just brutal!

There are about thirty to forty participants made up of a bunch of geeks; developers, system designers, QA leads, network architects, DBA's and Project Managers. And we're all there locked in a large conference room with white boards all around, laptops scattered everywhere and system maps and diagrams plastered on every space not occupied by a white board.This was our opportunity to make sure all the workstreams and silohs actually gelled!

Each session began sharply at 8:30am and ended no earlier than 6:30pm. This, alone, pissed me off since I can't even speak, not to mention being far from coherent, before nine in the morning! (Even nine is questionnable.) So this was a huge deal for me. There was breakfast and lunch served each day, which made it worse! When food is on the agenda, this really means: "We'll bring you sandwiches. You poor fuckers aren't going anywhere!" (Queue evil laugh.) And that's exactly what happened! Even through the breakfast and lunch portion on the agenda, participants were delivering technical explanations with ham and cheese hanging out of their mouth or choking on a chicken breast.

My team and I came prepared. We all downloaded games on our iPhones last week and I generated a variety of corporate bingo game cards to keep us busy. We were all seated towards the back of the room, which worked out perfect. My thought was, if we were going to suffer, we're all going to suffer together and make it through this!

Day one was tolerable, kind of.

Day two of lock-down gave me nothing but ass and leg cramps topped with a migrain.

By day three, we were way past over it! (Or at least I was.)

I was having visions of rabid geeks running wild throughout the corporate business park, releasing viruses into the network, obfuscating databases, or opening up firewalls to open the floodgates to all that is evil!!! Muwahahahahaha!

Day four started abruptly. I think everyone was just ready to power through the day to get the fuck out of there. It was insane! People were forfeiting bio breaks to keep on plugging through in hopes to be out sooner than six o'clock. At one o'clock, I received an IM from my boss that read: "[Tech-Babe], I have to get out of here. I think there was something in that tuna wrap from yesterday's lunch that's not sitting well with me."

[Thought Bubble: "What's this? He's leaving the rest of the session up to me?!?! THANK GAWD!!!!]

About six others left right after my boss for the same reason. These were all the tuna-wrap folks. I had to ask myself: Of course! Food poisoning! Why didn't I think of that?!

Day four lock-down ended at three o'clock sharp. I thanked everyone for coming and bearing through the torture and directed everyone towards the Santa Monica pier for happy hour.

All in all, it was quite productive; a brutal, yet necessary exercise. I made sure there were no sharp objects in the room. I'm just glad it's over! Oh, and I found my ass that I thought I lost from sitting on it for too long.