QOTD: "One must forgive one's enemies, but not before they have been hanged." - Heinrich Heine
Reading: Charles F. Laseron, South With Mawson
Listening to: The Capitol Steps, Sheik, Rattle and Roll!
Decluttering accomplishments: uh, I am thinking about unpacking sooner or later
I had to travel this week, for the first time since the terrorist attacks. The lack of travel really had nothing to do with the attacks. It was a combination of some local meetings and the Jewish holidays. Anyway, my travel schedule is plenty hectic over the coming weeks, so it's worth saying something about what it's like now.
The first annoyance was having to travel on Sunday, as my Monday meeting started at 8 in the morning. I had an early afternoon flight and, based on news reports about the situation at LAX, I left home in time to be there three hours ahead of time. I also called United to check the flight status and they told me it was at one of the terminal 6 gates.
The biggest issue with getting to LAX is that they don't allow any non-commercial vehicles into the airport at all right now. They have added more passenger pick-up/drop-off points but there's still more traffic at the off-airport lots than normal. I also had to make my way around the idiots in SUVs who didn't understand that the first two hours parking are free, so had stopped at the entrance instead of driving into the lot. Still, I know my way around well enough that I had no real trouble finding a spot and walking to the depot. They are running a lot more shuttles than normal, so there wasn't much of a wait. The bus was crowded, however. In fact, the last bus I was on that was anywhere near that full also had goats and chickens on it.
Anyway, I believed what United had told me, so got off at terminal 6. I showed my ticket and driver's license to the people at the foot of the escalator to security. And then I found out that I had to check in downstairs and get a boarding pass - a minor detail which contradicted what United had told me. (Their web site explictly said - and, in fact, still says - that one could check in at the gate.) And they had their entire terminal 6 lobby closed, so I had to walk over to terminal 7. (They also had the inside walkway between the terminals closed. Not that it matters in this weather, but it was an annoyance.) Incidentally, to show just how reliable their information is, my flight had also changed gates and was going out of terminal 7.
Outside terminal 7, the line stretched nearly back to terminal 6. You would have thought they were giving out money. So much for the claim that nobody is flying now. I figured that there had to be a Premier line, so walked up to the front of the line. There I saw that there was no line for the electronic check-in machines. I fought my way into the door - where I learned you can't use the machines if you have a paper ticket. Fortunately, the Premier line was nearby and had only a few people in it. I waited under fifteen minutes for a boarding pass. I went over to the escalator for the back security checkpoint. For some reason, they had the escalator off, even though the checkpoint was open. So I had to wait behind the people bumping their roll-aboards up the stairs. They had only one of the three lanes open, presumably because they are short-handed. (My personal theory is that they are understaffed because they were finally forced to lay off all the illegal aliens.)
Remember the part about having been told to be there 3 hours ahead of time? I now had two and a half hours to wait. I read for a while. A couple of my colleagues showed up and we gossiped and whined. There may be a claim that flights were running half full, but ours was completely packed. (We later heard that pretty much every flight from LAX to Denver on Sunday was full.) The flight itself was completely routine. Well, except for our actually being on time, but I'm not about to complain about that.
The trip home was a rather different experience. I'd heard several horror stories about DIA, inluding two colleagues having reported waiting nearly three hours in line at security. (One missed a flight; the other made his with ten minutes to spare.) So I left myself even more time. As it turned out, they added service agents to handle the Premier line, so it took me under ten minutes to check in. I said that I'd like an earlier flight if I could get one, and was suprised when the agent put me on a 3:35 flight. It was 2:45 and I asked if I'd be able to get through security to get a flight that soon. He assured me it should take under 15 minutes.
It took a bit longer than that, but was still not too bad. They did manage to go through every pocket of my briefcase, which is quite a lot of pockets, particularly since I had my pocketbook inside it. They even opened my key case. I'll also note that one of the security people was a woman wearing an Islamic head scarf, which vaguely pleased me. The National Guard is also in evidence at DIA, though I couldn't tell what the guardsman I saw was doing aside from looking intimidating. Anyway, I made the plane easily. That flight was about 2/3 full, by the way, and was also on time.
One of my colleagues was not quite so fortunate. She returned her rental car, got out her bags, looked in her backpack - and realized that she had left her wallet back in Boulder. She was making frantic telephone calls when I got on the rental car shuttle. I am assuming she found a way back to Boulder, as I didn't see her at the office this morning.
As for the trip itself, the first day of meetings was so awful that I told several people I thought that the only reason for them was to guarantee we'd be too tired to ask questions when we did get to the meaty material. I also had a major clash with my upper management. I probably was not as tactful as I might have been about a few things, but I felt that I had a good understanding of what I was responsible for and was being actively prevented from doing my job. I am doing what I usually do, which is trying my damndest to ignore the politics and just get the work done, but I am somewhat concerned about potential repercussions. (There's another problem, which can be summarized as "if you're angry at me, tell me directly instead of arranging for me to hear things third hand." But that's another matter.)
On the plus side, I do have some Boulder food pornography from this trip! Sunday night, a large group of us went to Redfish, where I ate some nicely spicy blackened redfish. On Monday, we were pressured into eating at the corporate cafeteria as we worked late. But I was smart and just got a salad, so Mary Joan and I went to eat real dinner at Viet Hoa later on. A bowl of rice noodles and all sorts of odds and ends flavored with lots of lemon grass was very soothing. We finished early enough on Tuesday night to have a relaxing and elegant supper at Chautauqua. I succumbed to one of my rare desires for meat and ordered venison, which was delicious, as were the accompanying grilled vegetables and mashed sweet potatoes. There was also a wonderful chocolate tart with raspberry sauce for dessert. It didn't quite make up for the awfulness of work, but it did help.
Copyright 2001 Miriam H. Nadel