First Travel Story...

So, I was in a frenzy yesterday and today getting things straightened out so that I could head out of town for my first trip out of the LA area as ALM09. I'm headed off to Atlanta for the beginning of a couple of weeks of rubbery goodness with the Mr SouthEast Rubber weekend this weekend and contest and then back here in Los Angeles for the West Coast Rubber event and contest next weekend.

Anyhow, so I got my code pretty stable on our development and staging servers (yeah, geek by profession). In a frenzy of packing late last evening/this morning (thank you to my savior and husband, Loren) I managed to get out the door, get to the office (since today had to be the day I got the email saying my email inbox was full, and I wasn't able to log on to my work computer remotely to empty it) and get to Burbank airport with just over 45 minutes to spare. I got my bag checked - 50.0 pounds exactly (Woo hoo) and just after grabbing my mentos for the flight discovered that they had started boarding.

I got on the plane, and wandered all the way to the next to last row for my window seat, only to discover that in the row right in front of me is a woman with a small child and a lap-toddler. Both of the kids are somewhat restless, but not too bad. The young boy wants to sit in another row by himself. The flight attendant informs the woman that if the baby is going to sit in her lap she needs to sit on the other side of the plane because they have three oxygen masks over the two seats rather than just two like on the left side of the plane (this is something I had never thought about before). So they move to the other side. As they do so, I discover they guy who was about to sit there (now sitting in front of me) has a small dog in a carrier with him. Oh goody...

The plane is just about full, the flight attendant tells the boy that he can sit next to her if he likes. On comes the captain, indicating that we need to close all of our blinds cause the plane will heat up really quickly, and oh yeah, we're going to start bringing some bags onto the plane, since from a flight balance standpoint the count more under the aircraft than above the wings (I get the physics of it, makes sense, but I'm wondering, ummm why...this isn't exactly a puddle jumper). So, it turns out the runway at atmosphere are just hot enough that we're too heavy for liftoff. Apparently every six bags they can get up above in the overeheads means one less person that will need to be bumped. I think two people volunteered to leave the plane.

I'm sitting there, wondering, "Ummm.... US Airways, guys, it's late August. HOT IS NORMAL! Why did you book the craft so full that you'd have to bump people?" So, this goes on for about 35 minutes. The captain comes on saying that they are going to start strapping luggage into the empty seats. Now I'm thinking, "boy, isn't the picture of modern capitalism at it's finest, let's cram so many people into the craft that we have to dump some, and then shove some luggage in with the people to 'balance the plane'. I can just see someone going back to a third world country saying 'man, in America, they put the baggage with the people'." But seriously, so much for systems intelligence. August = heat = put fewer people in small aircraft = no complaints or delays.

Again, after about 35 minutes of this (it's now 1:12 for our 12:44 departure...clock is ticking on my Phoenix transfer), the captain comes back on the PA and says..."well folks, I know this day isn't turning out to be fun for you..." I could hear the "you know you'll laugh about this at someday" coming, having an inkling of where this is going. Mind you, the hottest time of day is usually between 2 and 3pm in the summer...

He continued "...but, it turns out, after we got all that weight shuffled, we had to check back in with traffic control, and, well, the temperature on the runway went up a degree while we were working. What that means is that, well, we're going to have to take off another 1700 pounds. A woman just getting off the plane has said to me that we're making everybody anxious. Let me tell you folks, we are well within our engineering safety margins for flying, but we need to make sure we have no questions about being able to get up off the runway."

I immediately grabbed my laptop and got up, knowing that they were going to have to bump 8-10 people, and that while they were figuring that out, I was definitely going to miss my connection in Phoenix. Got to the gate agent, adn discovered that the next options out for me is the red eye. But I got a $300 travel voucher.

So here I am, at my desk, at home, working, rather than sitting in Pheonix waiting for a red-eye all by myself.

And when you've got a national or international title, you'll do just about anything for a plane ticket ;-)