Yesterday, the alarm went off at 4. Of course, per usual custom, I had been opening my eyes every 5 minutes or so since 2, to be sure that I wouldn’t miss it. Gee, thanks subconscious. I didn’t want to sleep anyway.
Got to the airport, and realized that I had left the boarding pass on the printer. Okay, all good, stood in line to get a new one. Then, in a miraculous break, I was up to date on the “no fly” rules, and got to keep all my toiletries. Yay!
Got to Philadelphia in time to watch the sun rise over the tarmac. I’ve developed a sort of affection for sunrise over the second airport of the day. Since I had a full 50 minutes between flights, I sauntered over and got coffee from the decent place (“Java and Jazz”, at the end of C terminal), then sat and downloaded email in the free wireless spot (food court between B and C). Then I went to the bus over to the F terminal, sat on the shuttle, and tried (silently) to get all the way through Metallica’s “Sanitarium,” replacing “sanitarium” with “Philadelphia” at every chance. Welcome home.
When I got to the F terminal, I finally looked up at the departure board to figure out which puddle jumper prop-jet I was on for the flight to Norfolk. None of them. No flight listed. My brain …slooooowly… turned over, chugged to life, glanced at my watch, and hustled back to the shuttle bus. Flat out sprinted to the B concourse, since apparently Norfolk is worthy of a real jet, on Monday mornings. I was the last one on, they were closing the door, blah blah.
Showed up at Langley and tried to get my permanent badge. Apparently, there’s only one human being in the world who can do that for me, and she wasn’t there. When would she be back? Unknown. Today? Maybe. Tomorrow? Well, see, they don’t keep a fixed schedule of that sort of thing. Most likely next week. Ah, Virginia civil servants.
After that, we re-wired and built out a 50TB San. I crawled under the raised floor to find a 30A circuit. I don’t know why I even bother wearing nice clothes.
The guys finally called my bluff around 8pm, saying something like “we know you’ll happily work all night, but we have to call it.” Thank god … I was about to show weakness.
My hotel didn’t screw anything up, and the salad bar at Ruby Tuesday was quite tasty.
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