I jolted out of bed at 4:20 am today, not because of something I heard but because of something I realized I hadn’t: my alarm. I had a 6 am flight to get to. So I quietly stumbled downstairs, shaved and showered about as sloppily as I know how, stepped into my suit, and hightailed it to Logan. Thank goodness for the empty roads at 4:45 am. I had enough time to purchase and eat a bagel sandwich at the airport before my seating group was called.
On to Pittsburgh, for a two hour meeting with a customer followed by lunch. I was booked on a connecting flight to Charlotte at 8 pm tonight, but after lunch I called our travel agent to see if I could do something sooner. She said, “Well, there’s a flight that leaves at 3:35. Can you make that?”
I looked at the time on my phone. It was 2:05 pm and we were 40 minutes from the airport. “Sure,” I said.
Fifty minutes later, I was standing in line behind two young women who were pulling flat-panel LCD screens out of their laptop bags to run them through security. I inquired, and found out they were auditors, taking their office with them. I could tell they didn’t travel much: one of them left her boarding pass in her briefcase, then after it was fetched back for her grabbed the wrong boarding pass and we had to wait for it to go through the belt again.
After all that, I got to the gate just as my section was finishing its boarding. I squeezed into my middle seat and collapsed for a bit…
Until I got to Charlotte, where I rented a car and drove through heavy hurricane-remnant rain up to Asheville. Now I’m here, spending a day and two nights with my family before going back to Charlotte Sunday morning for the itSMF conference. But at least I don’t have to go anywhere tomorrow. Maybe I’ll nap.