seriously?

I was in Edinburgh last week for a training course. This course was part 2 of 4 that about a dozen of us are going through over a two-year period (not critical information, but background is always nice). Because we ALL complained so much about the hotel accommodations for part 1 of the course, the super-sweet girl from HR kicked it up a notch for this session. Note Exhibit A below: the television in my hotel room.



Now, despite my initial giddiness over the size of that screen...as a group, we noticed several constraints to our full enjoyment of all of our respective room screens:

1. We were in 'class' from 8:30 am through to 7:00 pm (on average) each day we were there.
2. Our dinner seating was consistently approximately 45 minutes after each day's session ended.
3. After-dinner drinks were clearly not a course requirement, but we're all so cool that we couldn't NOT hang around and chit-chat, which translated into arrival back in the room somewhere between 11:00 pm and 1:00 am (yes, I was one of stragglers).
4. Such a late arrival back in the room forced a decision between taking advantage of a precious few moments of wonder at the screen and an immediate plunge into the already small amount of sleeping time on offer (clearly, I went for the precious few moments of screen enjoyment, which forced an even later bedtime).
5. The list of channel selections was disproportionately small compared to the size of the TV screen (I think the total was 8 channels, 3 of which were sports-only stations).
6. None of us realized before our arrival that there was also a DVD player hooked up to each TV, and therefore none were in possession of quality viewing material.

All of this rolled up to the following:

1. I came home VERY sleep-deprived.
2. I still don't feel like I got anything close to a justified amount of quality viewing on that screen.
3. I'm definitely going to have to stay there again (I mean, it's Edinburgh, so we KNOW I'll be back there sometime soon).