Travel ups and downs
We had meant to find some lunch in Montreal before heading to the airport, but by the time the meeting ended, one of us had already had his flight cancelled, so we decided not to pass Go or collect $200.
“We’ll put you on the 3:30 flight to Chicago,” the nice agent at the counter with the American accent said. “It’s already posting a delay to 6 pm.” Left unsaid: who knew when or even whether my scheduled 5:35 flight would take off?
As usual, I got the Total Security Treatment. Bag search, patdown, whole nine yards. Could someone please tell me what profile I fit so I can figure out how to stop fitting it? I will swear blue in the face if you like that I have never, ever, ever meant any harm to anyone or anything on an airplane. I’m scared of airplanes. Why on earth would I want to make those rattletrap baling-wire-and-duct-tape contraptions any less safe than they already are?
Things must have gotten better at Chicago during the afternoon, because my new flight took off a few minutes after 5. Got to Chicago a bit before 6 (remember the time change!), and then had a decision to make. I was in plenty of time to catch my 9:00 flight to Madison. I could also zip down to the Bus-Shuttle Center and pick up a 7:00 bus that would get me home at 10 or 10:30 or thereabouts.
Hm. Clean, uncrowded, utterly reliable bus, or three hours’ wait in a very crowded and noisy O’Hare with no guarantee the (sorta scuzzy, possibly crowded) plane would take off on time, or indeed at all, though if it did take off on time, I’d be home maybe a half-hour or so earlier.
No contest. Bus.
And as it turned out, my hazy memory of the bus schedule was wrong, and I made a bus that left at 6:30. Debarked at the Union promptly at 9:32, and for once I met the 6 bus toward home, which I usually don’t quite manage to do—and best of all, David happened to be on that bus, and I got to watch his face light up when he saw me.
Lest you worry on behalf of my client over my profligate spending habits, let me hasten to assure you that a cab to my house from the Madison airport costs just as much as the bus ticket home from O’Hare. Trust me, it’s a wash.
It was a good trip, I must say, on the whole better than ACRL. Exhausting though it is to sit in a small conference room for eight-plus hours debating encryption standards and whatnot (”okay, so we make a table in the authentication object with the various appropriate public keys and then the symmetric key for the book encrypted with that public key—hey, maybe you should patent this!”), I’d forgotten how walking into a roomful of standards geeks feels like coming home. I don’t have that sense of ease with librarians yet.
Doesn’t hurt to understand what I now understand about encryption and certificates and digital signatures and the like, either.
And no guarantees, but I picked up a couple of hot job tips. Y’all can’t have ’em this time; they’re mine-all-mine. Like I said, I get along pretty well with standards geeks.