15 November 2004 (written 16 November 2004)
Monday was the first day of the workshops. We got up and had breakfast – toast with Lyn’s wonderful apricot jam, “pawpaw” (fresh papaya), and OJ. Left the house at 7:30 AM for the hotel where the workshops were to be held. Then, we stood awkwardly in the corner of the room while Fiona (I was introduced from a-far to this woman who I know as QSR Help Desk staff who has helped me tremendously with NVivo over the past year or two; she didn’t look anything like I had envisioned) and Lyn rushed around getting things ready. I shifted from foot to foot. Participants and other trainers started arriving. “Hullo!” said someone at my elbow. I started. Chris. I was so relieved to see her. I started telling her all about how Jarrah was doing (“she seemed really stiff this morning” (the dog has arthritis)), and about dinner the night before, and about the Richards’ house – everything she had missed since we’d dropped her at the hotel the night before. I couldn’t believe how glad I was to see her. It was only twelve hours, and I hadn’t thought I was particularly close to her before. I mean, we shared a room, we spent some time together, but mostly we left each other alone. Dan wandered in a bit later, and we nodded hello to each other, but that was about it.
In the N6 workshop, there were about ten participants, and twelve trainers. Lyn had decided to teach the workshop in a novel way this time – having participants work with entirely their own data for both days. Usually she has everyone work with tutorial data for the first day, and then the second day is their own data. Unfortunately for me, I just felt that the day dragged. I was surprised there wasn’t confusion and chaos as everyone worked on something different, but without that, there was little to do. And I’m not overly comfortable in N6 anyway, so I was taking even a further backseat, but trainers outnumbered participants more than 2:1. The best part of the workshop was midmorning coffee break, when the hotel brought us a huge plate of hot scones with whipped butter and strawberry jam. They were delicious. Over lunch, this woman came up to me. “I recognize you from your picture!” she said, “I’m Sue Bullen.” “Jen Patashnick,” I said, redundantly, while shaking her hand. Sue. Sue has also been a lifesaver for me, as one of my very first contacts at the QSR Helpdesk. She too looked nothing like I’d envisioned. It was good to meet her, though.
But all in all, I was really disappointed with the day. And kind of bored! I thought how horrible it was to be thinking I was bored when these workshops are what I’m really here for!! This was supposed to be the absolute best part of the trip, right?! Lyn doesn’t usually disappoint me, either, but something just felt off. Slow. Low energy. I shrugged it off. Hopefully Tuesday would be better.
I grabbed Chris in the afternoon coffee break and asked if she’d made it into the city the night before, like she had said she wanted to. “No,” she said, “I didn’t want to go by myself and it was late; I just stayed in.” “What about tonight?” I asked, “Do you have dinner plans?” She didn’t. After the workshop ended for the day, we decided to go into Melbourne. I was eager to get away, get out, and get alone. I wouldn’t have minded a small group, but I certainly didn’t want a crowd of twenty people. (The UGA N6 workshops had been like that – small, six or so of us, the first day, and then, after everyone else found out we’d had a great time, twenty people the next day – way too many.) My preference was to beat a hasty retreat with Chris alone. I quietly told Lyn I was going out with Chris and would find my own way back to their house later by taxi, and professed ignorance about anyone else’s plan.
Since we knew we needed to catch a bus, Chris and I stopped at the concierge to get details. And a map. Neither of us had a map. When we asked for one, the woman at the desk pulled out a phone book with a map on the inside front cover. I rolled my eyes. Obviously, we weren’t going to walk around with the hotel phone book all night. I wanted to leave the premises so desperately I was actually contemplating us just going without a map, but the woman said she could photocopy it for us, and pointed out a few streets we should walk down. Chris and I thanked her, but when we turned around, Kakali and two of the other trainers from New Zealand were there asking us what we were up to. I felt badly for blowing them off a little, but Chris didn’t seem like she was really eager to socialize with them either, so we just made “well, we’re ready to leave now, and are headed into the city, and don’t want to wait…” excuses, and the three of them decided to do their own thing. As soon as we were out the door, I breathed a sigh of relief, and Chris and I immediately started critiquing the workshop, in between pretending to pay attention to find a bus stop.
Chris was also frustrated by what seemed to her like a lack of productivity and not enough time for the participants to work on their own, hands-on, without being lectured. I agreed, and made some comparisons to other times I’ve seen Lyn teach. Chris was still contemplating the differences between how Lyn had presented things and how Chris herself presents when she teaches. (Although she knew Lyn already, Chris had never seen her teach.) Somewhere in this discussion, we boarded a bus, asked for roundtrip tickets into the city, paid up, and found seats. Our discussion continued. Half an hour later, it occurred to me to look out the window. We weren’t in the city. In fact, it was looking strangely rural. Chris asked a guy who looked to be about our age (Chris is 29) which way the city was. Behind us. Grand. We’d managed to board a bus going the wrong direction. (Although, thinking about it now, I don’t understand why the driver didn’t tell us that when we got on and asked for city tix…) “Should we get off?” Chris asked the other passenger. He suggested we get off at the next stop, a train stop, and then take the train into the city. “How do we do that?” asked Chris. Turned out our tickets worked for the train too. “Which side of the platform?” Chris wisely asked. “And what stop do we get off?!” I added.
So we caught the train. I had half an eye on the scenery, but Chris and I continued our debriefing and general discussion about qualitative research, N6, NVivo, and the other software packages she knows. We talked about meeting the next night to work on some questions I have been mulling over the way VIA makes use of NVivo. She said she’d love to write it off as consultancy; she’d even buy me dinner. Fantastic, I said. We had a plan.
Despite mutual distraction, we did get off at the right train station (Flinders Street), and then walked down to the Yarra river. Then, we started to slowly walk up and down the streets that had been pointed out to us on the map. Unfortunately, it seemed that most places were closed or closing. We bought postcards at one store. Chris wanted to have a beer, but I was rather interested in dinner. There seemed to be a lot of Asian-type cafes (Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Indonesian, etc.) We started to head for the Indonesian place, but it seemed too casual. I wanted a sit-down place where we’d order food from menus. One of the next storefronts was a Turkish restaurant that looked interesting so we went there instead. We were seated way in the back. We were still talking like crazy, so hadn’t even looked at the menu when the waitress came to take drink orders. We asked for her suggestion on local beers, and ordered one each. We decided on tapas, and ordered four – Turkish bread with babaghanoush, fried Greek cheese, pumpkin and basil arancini (rich balls), and lamb skewers with some sort of balsamic glaze. Conversation continued. The food was decent, and Chris ordered another beer. Then, we moved to the front section so she could smoke. (I have to say – that is the number one thing that really makes me feel sadly about her – smoking. However, when I brought it up to her today not particularly tactfully, she didn’t take offense, and said that she does want to stop smoking, particularly so she can lose weight and look better in her wedding dress – the wedding is April 9th.) We were still talking so we decided to stay for a bit and each ordered another beer. We talked work, we talked bosses, we talked friends, we talked education, sex ed, confessed fears, and discussed relationships. (Our relationships are surprisingly similar.) We finally headed out of the restaurant around 10, scheming how to get her to Boston (she’s never been to the States) and me to the UK, both in the next couple years.
We spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how to get on a bus going the proper direction, but it soon appeared that we had missed the last bus of the route we needed to catch. We hailed a cab. The cabbie drove just about as well as he spoke English (that would be poorly…). “This was really great,” we kept saying to each other all the way back to the Beau Monde hotel. And it really was. We’d both had a fantastic evening. She pulled A$50 out of her wallet (almost twice what the meter was reading at the time) and handed it to me, saying she could expense it, so I should just get a receipt when I disembarked. She leaned across the backseat to give me a hug goodnight.
As we drove off, the cabbie said to me, “So, you’re from UK?” “No, America,” I corrected him, wondering how anyone could confuse my Vville-Boston speak for British. Then it dawned on me. “But she is!” I added.
I got to the Richards’ around 11. Lyn held the dogs* back as the taxi left. She asked how my night was. “Chris is really nice,” I said, for lack of anything particularly insightful. “Best thing to happen to Ann,” said Lyn. (Ann, a very well know expert on qualitative software is Chris’ colleague and effectively, her boss, of whom Chris speaks very highly. Again, something we have that is parallel and in common.) Suseela wanted to borrow my computer to do e-mail, so I ended up waking Kakali twice – once when I came to get the computer, and once when I came back to actually go to bed. I hoped her evening had been as pleasant as mine. I lay in bed awake until 1 AM. My head was reeling, trying to think through a slew of ideas I’d had about using NVivo, some which were spawned by the N6 workshop; others from my lengthy discussions with Chris. I put on headphones, booted up my MP3 player, and listened to music for about half an hour until I was dozing off. I shut it down, turned over, and went to sleep.
*Have I mentioned the dogs? Jarrah, yes, but what about Decker? I’m not sure whose dog Decker is, but he’s a mostly black dog, twice the size of Jarrah, with silvering ears and other fur, getting on in years, I think. While Jarrah is rather reserved, Decker is very friendly, and acts the way one would expect a dog to act – wagging and interested whenever you go to pet him, as opposed to Jarrah who generally just stares at you and makes you reconsider how much you value your arm attached at the shoulder. Decker does what Altie used to do when you pet him – turn on his back, and want his tummy rubbed. Decker also likes to have his paws on you when you’re petting him, and runs them over his eyes and nose. It’s very cute. When he finally stands up, he reminds me of Altie since he will come over and put his head “upside down” on my thigh and make little “gurf”ing noises as you tousle his ears.
