Don’t touch me!
The Atlanta trip…wow. What a bizarre two days this has been. (in case you are wondering, ‘bizarre’ does not necessarily mean ‘good’) The plan was for me to fly down Friday morning, check in with the customer and then assist with what should have been a fairly simple change to a Sun Cluster running on a pair of v880s. The actual work would have been completed sometime during the evening Friday night, and I would stay through Sunday to provide any needed support. Yeah….this didn’t quite go as planned.
My adventure began Friday morning when my darling wife drove me to the airport. Fortunately I arrived plenty of time in advance, because just as I get in the security line, some clown looks at my ticket and informs me that I have been randomly selected for “special screening”. For the remainder of this post, I will refer to it as “Groping the Bond”. After staggering out of the “special” area, with belt, shoes, luggage and pride in tow, I grab a coffee and get on my plane. The plane ride down went relatively well, especially since I had the entire row to myself on the way down. Once I arrived at the airport in Atlanta, I make my way to the Alamo Rental Cars, where I had reserved my car. Hertz, Enterprise, Avis, and every other rental stand was completely empty; the Alamo line, was an hour long wait. Miserable…
So, I get the car and check into the hotel. I call the customer, who is actually in Florida, to let her know that I’m in town and ready to get started. She then tells me that due to Hurricane Francis, they did the work Thursday night from remote….and it went very well. To make sure my time wasn’t wasted, I offered to do an audit on the system and make sure everything looked ok. After she agreed, I changed my flight arrangements from Sunday to Saturday. If anything, I would get home for a least the last half of the labor day weekend. I managed to book a flight for 3:05pm…
So one benefit to being in Atlanta, is that one of my co-workers is based there. Once I wrapped things up at the datacenter, I met Brad and his wife Paula for lunch. They were very considerate of my schedule and we ate at a restaurant in the airport. We began lunch two hours prior to my flight’s departure. After a very enjoyable lunch, I head to the security line, which wasn’t that bad at all. I approach the first security clown. “Sir, you have been selected for a dose of “Groping the Bond”. You have got to be kidding me. This was clearly not random, but a case of a someone using Homeland Security as a reason to get their filthy rat claws on me. So I turn the corner to the groping section, and find one of the longest lines that I have I ever seen. Fifty-five minutes later, I find myself running with my belt, shoes, luggage, and pride to gate T11; just in time to see a perfectly fine American Airlines S80 leaving…without me. Fortunately, my original travel plans had a three hour layover built in at DFW, so the fine people at AA booked me on another flight, and I finally made it home around 9:00PM.
In short, this Bond Groping has gone far enough. Now I’m don’t fancy myself a conspiracy theorist, or even slightly paranoid…but I truly believe that someone is out to get me.
One Response to “Don’t touch me!”
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I’m a big fan of this blog and I check it regularly. Keep up the good work!