Que Sara Sara

I live in the US and or state teachers/school staff union had a conference this week. I like to be given as much information as possible, process it, then organize things. This is my thing. I am autistic after all.

Last week I started emailing the coordinator of the event so that I could get some info, like where the event was, what hotel, etc. She got back to me with that info.

Now, the rooms were paid for by the union. We had to pay for parking. That was it. I had to pay for half my room fee because being autistic I didn’t want a stranger as a roommate. I’m 44yo and have my ways and a hard enough time sleeping anyway. That was fine.

So I put the address of the hotel into my GPS app, Waze (it’s great! I can do a blog just on that if people want one.) and it was all set. I got up at about 6am Monday morning. I finished packing, got ready, went down, had my coffee, did my thing until about 9:50am and then headed out. It takes about 2 hours to get to the city where the event took place, but I wanted to leave a little early because it’s summer, so road construction season, slow drivers (there were a ton), etc.

The ride down was uneventful, except for too many people going well under the speed limit. I got to the hotel to find they had their own parking garage. That I didn’t know. I pull up, $10 cash for parking. Crap. My parking garage fee was on my debit card because I thought it was a different parking garage. He said they would put it on my hotel room bill. Oh cool. And I was in. I could pay it when I got inside!

I’d arrived rather early, by 11:30 I think, and it was A. Too early to check into my hotel room, and B. Once I got inside it was too early to register for the event. So I sat around and waited. Then I got in line to register at a little before noon.

So now I have my schedule (I’d of course already printed one out) and it still didn’t say if there was lunch (I hadn’t eaten since 8am). They also didn’t say where the opening ceremony was that was scheduled for 1pm. I went to my first session room, which didn’t begin until 2:15, because there was no lunch.

Question: why would you have a conference registration at noon and not serve sandwiches or anything? I had time to go get food, but no money to do so. I was sh*t out of luck (SOL) as we say.

So, I say, by myself, upstairs in a conference room for 2 hours by myself very anxious, hungry, and sweaty because of all of this. I took some anxiety meds and hoped for the best.

So after the two mind-numbingly boring and dry presentations that I went to, we all made our way back downstairs. I attempted to check into my room. Get ready for the sh*t to hit the fan…

I get up to the desk, tell them my name and that I have a single/private room. So he asked if I was parked in the garage. I said yes and gave him the details he needed for my car. He then said there was a $10 parking fee (which I knew), and a $20 incidentals fee. Wait, what?! This all had to go on my card. I had $18.44 on my card. I asked if I could pay some in cash. He said I’d have to pay $265 if it was cash. I was like, I have $7 in cash. I should have gone home then and gotten the money back for the room. So I asked if they would take a card over the phone and called my mom. That was done. She was mad I asked for money and here I was about to have a meltdown in the lobby. I told her I didn’t know about the extra fees. I thought the room was paid for except for parking.

So I go to the garage and get my luggage out of my car, head back in, go up to the 9th floor and go into my gorgeous room with a wonderful view of the harbor.

I relaxed in my room for a bit before dinner, got a much welcomed, but terrible cup of coffee. I then went down to dinner. I met some wonderful people and had a good time. The chicken was a bit dry, but it wasn’t awful at all. I was so happy to have food that I over ate and felt gross for a while.

I went back up to my room rather than play games with a bunch of people downstairs. I was exhausted from all the anxiety, sore from the hard chairs of the conference, and just DONE.

At about 8:15pm I took my bedtime medication and tried to read in bed, which was a bit hard, the bed mattress, not the reading. Then at 8:30 the room next door starts playing music very loudly. Now, the music wasn’t bad, but the noise level was. So, I called down to the front desk and had them send up security. It stopped, but by then it was 9pm. So, I shut my light off and tried to sleep.

Problems with the gorgeous room: the mattress was hard, the pillows were not comfortable, the air conditioner was not working well and sounded like a helicopter taking off every 10 minutes. Seriously. I actually looked out the window the first time to see if there was a helipad really close by. Nope.

So, I dozed/slept lightly until 6:30am Tuesday. I did dream a few times, but they were always nightmares about men trying to break into my room. I kept waking up and had to roll over.

I got up and took a shower, feeling like I was run over by a truck. The shower was nice. I got out and anxiety started settling in. It got worse and worse as I was packing up my stuff to go down and check out before breakfast and the conference restarted. I went into an anxiety attack and I couldn’t breathe and I was very shakey. I was nearly crying. I took some heavy duty anti anxiety meds and they weren’t really working.

I was like, what am I doing? I was miserable yesterday, I slept horribly, whose to say today will be better? I decided right then that when I checked out of the hotel that I was not going back to the conference. I was going home. So I did. I got home before the first session started. I felt much better once I decided. I got some coffee (good coffee) and breakfast and be-bopped my way home.

Of course I gave the conference excellent reviews yesterday. (Sarcasm) I did not. I even told them that I left early, that the communication was very lacking, etc.

One of my biggest anxieties is not getting the information I need. People don’t put this into account because I’m guessing that it doesn’t affect neurotypicals like it does neurodivergent people. *Sigh*