Travel Delays (Part III)

Home!

How wonderful!

The flight was delayed out of O'Hare yesterday because of weather. I was supposed to be home by 13:00 but I was not headed to get my luggage at the baggage claim until after 14:00.

Mercifully, I was one of only five people (besides the driver) on the shuttle. One was going to the convention center, three were going to the Hyatt downtown, and then there was me. By 15:30 I was home. I took a shower, had a bite to eat, and then played with the dog. It was a wasted attempt to try to get back on this time zone, but it was worth the effort.

Unfortunately, it was this morning that I discovered that I had lost power at some point during my absence and all my clocks were wrong. I discovered this when I logged-on and started checking my email. My counterpoint in the UK wanted to know if I was unable to sleep. When I sent back an IM asking why he asked he pointed out that it wasn't even 09:00 back in the UK, which meant that it was before 02:00 here! Oops!

I headed back to bed and slept 'til a more reasonable 04:30 and then resumed catching-up on my email. It was a busy day today. I had not imagined it would be so, but in the two days it took to get back from London over two hundred emails had accumulated and I spent more than six hours on the phone in conference calls and catch-up meetings back here. It is now just after 16:00 and in the evening news playing over my left shoulder, I hear an interesting tidbit.

The CBS affiliate here is reporting that more than five hundred flights on British Airways have been cancelled since Friday and that the reason for the cancellations is that the BA catering company fired the four hundred workers that went on strike on Wednesday. Apparently, early Wednesday afternoon the BA Baggage Handlers went on strike in sympathy for the caterers. They just showed pictures of terminal four at Heathrow with people camping out in the departure lounges. I really missed the bullet there! They predict the strike to last another day and then there will be the hassle of trying to recover. I had an empty seat beside me on Wednesday. I bet there will not be an empty seat on that flight again until some time next week!

Well, I have a couple things to do and then I have to walk the dog. Things are returning to normal and I probably will be back on my time zone by the end of the weekend.

I hope that you are having a normal day wherever you are!

Don Bergquist - 12-August-2005 - Lakewood, Colorado