I was in Seattle last night. I had planned to fly home to San Luis Obispo at 7:20 PM and ultimately arrive at around midnight. But the fates had other plans.
Katherine dropped me off at my hotel and I was already running late. I ran through the glass doors, up the stairs, and entered the elevator. The elevators there required guests to slide their room keys to operate them. Judging by the title of this post, can you guess if my key worked? So I ran to the counter and had them fix it, then returned to the elevator and rode up to the sixteenth floor. I packed hurriedly and shot back into the elevator and headed for the lobby. When I stepped out, I found a line had formed where there was none before, and it took what felt like forever to get up to the counter. Everything was supposed to be billed directly to Microsoft, but of course they hadn’t heard of any such thing and were ready to happily charge everything to my credit card. I didn’t have time to work it out, so I told them they were supposed to bill Microsoft, left my phone number at the counter, and bolted out the front doors again.
Katherine was still there and drove me to the airport. We arrived at 7 PM and I hustled to the check-in counter, only to be told that my flight had been delayed by two hours and everyone who had checked in early (like we were supposed to) had been put on an earlier flight so they could still make their connecting flights. I could still take the delayed flight at 9 PM to San Francisco, but there wouldn’t be a plane there to take me to SLO. Katherine called a travel agent to arrange for another flight out of SF to SLO, but there wasn’t a ticket available until Monday. We looked into renting a car at the SF airport, but a one-way rental would incur a $400 drop off fee, which I didn’t have on hand. I could either take the delayed flight, spend the night with some family in San Mateo near SF, rent a car there Sunday morning, and drive down to SLO, or take a 7:25 AM flight out of Seattle to Salt Lake City and ultimately arrive in SLO at noon on Sunday. I picked the early flight.
I almost died getting up in the morning, getting only four and a half hours of sleep. The flight out of Seattle was delayed by forty minutes, and my schedule had only allotted me thirty minutes to change planes in SLC. I had to run for five minutes through three terminals with two bags and arrived to find the door of my plane already closed. I was breathless and about ready to keel over from stress and sleep deprivation and breathlessness. The crew was gracious enough to open the door again just for me. I was the last one to get on, by which time everyone else was already seated and waiting. I think the stewardess had already given the safety speech. It was one of those small planes, where the overhead compartments are much smaller, so it took about a minute of crunching and squeezing before I could shut the overhead compartment door and sit down again.
But I made it. Kiss my ass, fates!