It hasn’t really sunk in. Next week I was going to do EPICOR training, going to move to brand spankin’ new office, have a pre-birthday bash with Austin before he left. The fact that I’m writing this while sitting at gate 16 in Lisbon means I’ve taken it. If you think I’m being facetious about it, allow me to explain how I got here.
On Thursday I was told that one of the guys at my company had to go to Bahrein and couldn’t go to the 3GSM conference in Barcelona, Spain. One of my coworkers was going to go instead, but she actually pushed for me (!) to go instead. I loved the idea, felt very honored that people would trust me that much with such a short time in the company (9 days), but knew we had to find a flight. Because it required approval of someone else, we were left with having to pick a flight leaving Boston say, on Saturday the 11th, getting there Sunday before the conference started on Monday. Sounds reasonable right? I even found a reasonable fare from Swiss Airlines with one stop in Zurich for $564!
But I like to keep things interesting…
Problem is, there’s a snowstorm coming to Boston on Saturday night, the night of my supposed departure. So I can’t book that flight. To cut a long story short, I ended up booking a ticket 5 hours before the plane left, on Friday at 5:30PM. To give you an idea of how rushed this was, I was forced to both pick up a physical paper ticket at the travel agency in Somerville AND I was immediately booked with the dreaded “SSSS” on the ticket, sending me straight to “secondary screening” at the security checkpoint.
So the plan’s Boston->Newark->Lisbon->Madrid. As previously mentioned, I’m in Lisbon. As we were taxiing to the gate, I saw a dirty old Boeing 707 with good ol’ JT3D engines and an inscription which raised both my eyebrows:
“REPUBLIQUE DU ZAIRE”
As I left the immigration area in Lisbon, there were one set of stairs up to the exit and a single escalator. As if to yell out “It’s all true!”, the escalator was going down, making everyone exiting the immigration are to climb the stairs with luggage.
Aliás, in my last comment on aviation (I promise) during the TAP inflight safety demonstration video, they showed the “in case of depressurization” mask scenario–only in the bathroom! And guess what: two oxygen masks fall inside the bathroom! I knew aerospace engineers were the ones who really invented the mile-high club!
This week will be very interesting. I’ve got a lot of homework to do, I will try to see Fê and Dé in Madrid, and most important of all, I’m participating in the conference that sets the future discourse for 3G cell phones in the world. Will certainly post pictures.
ric
