I am so glad to be home. Where was I? I was in San Diego helping to run some trainings at our office out there. The big roll-out date for this project was on Monday the 7th and my boss sent me out to do the training for the SD group (don't think that this was in any way fancy. It totally was not). I was to fly out on Sunday the 6th, do the training on Monday the 7th, and then fly back on Tuesday the 8th. This is all fine and dandy but here's the thing: there isn't a direct flight from Boston to San Diego and so I was going to have to catch a connecting flight either in Los Angeles or Chicago. Can you guess where BOTH of my connecting flights where? If you guessed Chicago then you win! Chicago in December...what could POSSIBLY go wrong?
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The flights out where fine. I actually had no one seated right next to me so I was less uncomfortable. I refuse to say I was in anyway comfortable because having to sit in a big, metal tube with a couple hundred jackasses as it hurtles through the air while the chick in front of me flings her seat backwards crowding my personal space is in no way my idea of luxury. And I got to have a lovely 2 hour layover in Chicago. Do you know what you can do at an airport with 2 hours to kill? I have no idea. I'm honestly asking. All I did was finish up my book (Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safan Foer. I had started this book awhile ago but never got that far. I tore through it on this trip. It is a really great read) and people watch. I may have mentioned that I don't really care for people but I sure do like watching them.
Airports and air travel tend to bring out strange behavior in people. Either that or perhaps because of the close quarters, these idiosyncrasies become enhanced. I'm the type of person who needs to not only be on time but preferably early for any appointment. So I'm the guy sitting at the empty terminal a good half hour before anyone else shows up for the flight. Traveling stresses me out and so to ease my tension I will overcompensate by checking my boarding pass and gate information a couple hundred times to make ABSOLUTELY sure that I'm at the right place at the right time. I know, I know. Leave me alone. What I do is I'll go to the gate (super early) and sit and watch people. This also helps me chill out and feel better about my own quirks. People is fucked up, yo.
Finally I get to San Diego and you know what they say about southern California and all that crazy sunshine! I got a fucking downpour. It rained and rained and rained. Oh, and then the winds kicked in. The hotel we (I say "we" because the guy I share an office with [Seth] also went out. He works with the group I was going to train and hadn't actually met any of them yet) stayed in was in La Jolla which is just north of San Diego and supposedly quite swanky. All I saw was rain and flying palm fronds (hee! fronds). By the time I got to the hotel after several hours of travel (my plane left Boston at 7am EST and it was now 3:30pm Pacific time, so what's that? Like a day and a half or something?), I was pretty beat. I went to my room and pretty much crashed. I didn't even grab any dinner.
The next day the weather was even worse. All the local news stations were going on and on about how this was the worst storm they had seen all year and yada yada. Great. Nice timing O'Malley. We went to the office, banged out the training (at which I am much improved thank you very much) and then took a cab back to the hotel. We were going to get together with one of our vendors out there and have some dinner but I found out that this was actually more of a meeting rather than an interesting night out. I bailed on that and I'd like to say that I went exploring the area around the hotel but did I mention the goddamn rain? Yea, I stayed in and watched TV. I am a party animal people. Whatever. At least I got to watch Hoarders which is only the bestest show on the planet.
And then it was time to head back. We had the same flight out of San Diego and the same connector in Chicago (we didn't fly out together). As a matter of fact, it was the same plane that would take us into Chicago and then eventually to Boston. And with a 45 minute layover, that should mean that we won't have to get off the plane right (or "de-plane" as the flight attendants called it. Fuck that fake-ass term. This ain't Fantasy Island bitches)? Wrongo. When we finally got into O'Hare after hanging out in a holding pattern for 40 minutes, they told us that we'd have to get off the plane and then reboard in twenty minutes. Sonofa... Fine. The snow was kicking Chicago in it's frozen nuts and I was dreading having them tell us that oops, sorry, we can't fly out tonight. The odds were kind of stacked against us.
But, huzzah! We did manage to get back on the plane only an hour later than predicted and they flew my sorry ass back to Boston. I got into Logan at around 2am and I praised the Wiff for scheduling a PlanetTran car service to pick me up and ferry me home. That was pretty sweet. What really worked to my advantage is that my boss is super cool and told me not to come in to the office today. As a matter of fact, he told me to just take the day to make up for the loss of my Sunday. Schweet. I was so glad he said that 'cuz I didn't get home until 2:40 and I didn't really get to sleep until well after 3:30. I would have been toast at work today. And not yummy toast either. More like stale-ass bread that you hope will be ok once you pop it in the toaster but after a couple of bites you realize it just tastes like sadness. Yup. Just like that.
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