Travel is my nemesis. I have never been a good traveler – i got motion sickness a lot as a child, although we never really went on many family vacations so my motion sickness was usually during local travels. We did drive to Alabama in the summer once to visit step-relatives I had never met. That was fun. We had to go to Vacation Bible School for a week in spite of the fact that in our real lives, we never set foot in a church. Our brand-new step-cousins were going, though, so my sister and I were forced to go along. I don’t know what the adults were doing that required our absence via such evil means as attending VBS with strangers. I have always assumed some sort of redneck-Alabama key party ensued. Ew. During that vacation, we visited a step-aunt’s home one day and our new step-cousins broke out a bow-and-arrow set and a target. As the adults half-watched and chatted, we took turns trying to get the flimsy arrows to stick in the target, but more often than not, they landed somewhere between the archer and the target. I managed to get one to go pretty far, but it missed the target and flew through the hedges into their neighbors’ driveway. A few seconds later an angry, red-faced man came around the hedge, brandishing the arrow. “You could kill someone with this,” he screamed at me. He shook the arrow at all of us and continued to yell. I was scared shitless as I went to retrieve the arrow, mumbling about being sorry. The adults who had encouraged this activity just sat there and watched a stranger berate me, then laughed when he went back to his driveway.
Later, when I was married, I managed to either get sick or hurt myself during every vacation. During one trip to Key West, I sunburned my ass on day 1, then got a corneal abrasion, making it impossible to go outside into the bright sunlight. Then we went to a sushi restaurant. I saw wasabi for the first time and mistook it for guacamole. I took a big blob of it without diluting it with soy sauce. I was sitting on the edge of my chair due to my sunburn, tears rolling down my face from the heat of the wasabi.
Anyhoo, I mention this because I have to travel for bidness, but on my project, we do all of our jaunting during one brutal six-week stretch. We spend months preparing for a dog-and-pony show wherein we take our work and show it to boneheads, meeting weeks on end for two, three, or four days at a stretch. We have to explain why we didn’t do what we were asked to do (because we are frequently asked to do things that are flat-out WRONG), explain the obvious to the obtuse, and grit our teeth while hillbillies complain that they just cain’t unnerstayund whaa we hafta hayve so minny big wuurds in this sintince.
My adventure began last Sunday when I got to the airport in plenty of time, only to be told by the Genius Grant winners who run the Delta counter that I had booked my flight on the wrong day. I thought this was possible because a) it’s the sort of thing one would expect from me, and b) I had to book lots of travel back and forth to the same place, so errors could have been made. I asked them to check again, but nope, I wasn’t scheduled for the flight I knew I was scheduled for. I said that I had to get to my destination today, so they booked me on a later flight. Just as I was going back to the parking lot (after having called everyone I know to tell them that I had booked my flight for the wrong day), I realized that I had handed a sheaf of itineraries to the agent, but I hadn’t looked to make sure the correct one was on top. Sure enough, the itinerary on top was for a different flight, but the one for that day was in there, just further down the pile. Recall that I had asked them to double-check and they couldn’t find my reservation in their “system.” I went back to the counter – luckily, few poor suckers were flying Delta that day – and showed them the correct itinerary, the one for the flight they claimed I wasn’t booked on. Lo and behold, this time my reservation WAS there, but the check-in window was closed by about 3 minutes. They did some fancy typing and got me a boarding pass, but said the flight had already boarded so I had to run to make it.
Of course, the security line was filled with the human version of sloths, slow lorises, and something that is large, slow, and confused. I had to do a lot of shifting from one foot to another, teeth grinding, and deep breathing to keep from going all America on someone’s ass. When I finally got through, I rushed to the gate only to find that the flight hadn’t actually started boarding yet. Thanks, Delta!
The adventure continued in Atlanta. The connection was made, the flight was boarded, and then the captain came on the PA and announced that the plane was 6000 pounds overweight because they had overfueled it. They needed to get a defueler truck to suck 3 tons of gas back out of the plane before we could take off. It took a couple of hours to find the defueler truck at the Atlanta airport. The captain kept explaining crap about teamsters, shift changes, blah, blah, and begging people to try Delta again because this never happens. We arrived two hours late, late for a meeting that I wanted to miss anyway, but still…
So blah blah meeting. Then we went out to dinner to our traditional Sunday night restaurant, a place called The Chop House. We had the very same waiter we had a year ago on our first Sunday night of the summer – recognizable because of his unintelligible mumbly Cajun-esque accent. Since it was the Chop House, Juno ordered port chops, but Mumbly McMumbleson returned to say they were all out of chops tonight. She perused the menu again, then ordered Uncle Clem’s Chicken. As the waiter walked away, Forrest, another member of our team leaned forward, a shocked and disgusted expression on his face. “Did you really just order Uncle Tom’s Chicken?” he whispered. He’s one of my favorite co-workers even though he frequently pretends to be retarded to get out of having to do odious tasks. He’s generally speaking very good at the salient parts of his job, which is why they are taking him away from me and replacing him with someone who is neither competent nor entertaining.
