Traveling

I’m truly embarrassed and concerned about my recent trend in traveling. Usually I try to avoid early morning flights because of my abysmal flight catching rate. Sometimes, like when traveling east (due to the time difference), it is necessary to book an early morning flight. My flight this morning was at 6:40, which is better than say, 5:30 or 6, but is still too early for me. My first ominous sign was the failure of my watch alarm to “go off”, which is to say that I didn’t hear it. I woke up at 5, but then had to drive to pick up Jon, who was going to drive me to the airport in exchange for car borrowing services. We got to the airport roughly at 6:15, but I got confused about what airline I was flying and ended up in the wrong terminal! I then waited for Jon to drive around and pick me up so that we could go to the right terminal (I thought it would be faster than walking). I ran up to the AA counter only to learn that 20 minutes is too short a notice time to check in, so they had to rebook me on standby for the 12:20 flight (6 hours!). I was distraught and tired, but tried to be a good sport and went through the security line, wherein the MOST AMAZING thing ever happened. The man who looks at boarding passes and ID’s looked at mine and said, “USGS, right?”. At first I had no idea what was happening or what he was talking about, but then it dawned on me that he used to work as a security guard at the USGS! And he recognized me out of the millions of people for whom he has to check ID!

Once through security, I noticed that my original flight had yet to depart, so I was able to catch it, but my baggage was not, which meant that 1. I needed to drive back and get it later or 2. I could spend 6 hours in ORD waiting for it. I chose 2. due to the fact that 1. would entail the time of others and 2. would allow me to finish some work (and blogging) activities. So for the first time in my life, I’m one of those people who works on their laptop in the airport. It’s not half bad, the day has flown by and I have a newfound camaraderie with fellow airport workers!