The conference I attended vacillated between mildly interesting and wildly annoying. My roommate was a woman in her late fifties or early sixties (going on a hundred, I'd say). When she walked into our hotel room, I was sitting on the bed sending text messages. I couldn't see the door from there, so when she said loudly
"Oh, she's here now," I was not aware that she was alone.
When she came around the corner, I stood up and stuck my hand out to shake hers.
"Hi, I'm Heybartender."
She looked at it as if I had offered her a wet turd and said
"Yeah, I put that together."
She ambled over to her side of the room, plopped into the chair, and asked what time I had gotten in.
"I got in last night at about one in the morning."
"Then where have you been all day?" she demanded. I wondered if I was about to be grounded. It seemed as if she hadn't noticed that I had dropped my suitcase off at noon before I went out with my tour group, and for some reason it made her suspicious. I answered her very curtly, and then her phone rang. I texted my sister saying I was going to need a place to stay and left the room without another word.

There were seminars and a dinner, and after everyone was going to one of three get-togethers, all of which promised expensive drinks and terrible company. At the end of dinner, I sprinted up to the room, packed a small bag of overnight essentials, and headed directly to the parking lot. I left my suitcase on the bed, hoping The Roommate would sleep fitfully without the chain lock on the door.
My sister hadn't answered my texts, so I got in touch with my friend T, and headed down into the city to crash with him. He made me some pizza rolls and other various frozen veggie fare (another lovely aspect of the Airport Hotel is the fact that there were exactly two places to eat, one very expensive sit down place and a sort of grab-and-go sandwich counter area that was also incredibly expensive, as well as having almost no vegetarian food and always, always a line thirty-odd people long) and we talked for an hour or so before I finally had to go to sleep. I was up very early the next morning, bright of eye and bushy of tail as I often am when I wake up in a city. I dressed and washed up quickly and tip-toed out so as not to wake T. I went to a bakery right near my old apartment and got a huge cup of delicious coffee, an egg and spinach and feta sandwich on a croissant, and a dessert pastry, all for the same price that I had paid for a small cup of coffee and a shitty bagel at the hotel. It was glorious. I drove back out to the airport feeling fabulous. The day went fairly quickly, and the seminars were interesting. The Roommate was in my second one, and slept through the bulk of it, at one point waking herself up when she started snoring too loudly. At the lunch break I left again and drove a couple miles down the road to an Italian place, where I bought a big bag of fries and Ravioli with marinara from a guy who looked like an extra from Goodfellas. I caught a couple people eying my greasy fry bag hungrily during the next seminar, and ate them slowly and smugly at the next break in front of a long line of people waiting for their seven dollar pizza slices. Saturday night I pulled the same trick with The Roommate, leaving for my sister's without a word and my suitcase still on the bed. I slept soundly again, and again woke up feeling refreshed. Sunday was a short day, with only one seminar and a longer presentation on the Global Economic Shitshow.