And the Complaining Begins

I warned you . . . any posts this week will probably include whining and complaining. You may want to navigate away from my blog while you can.

So here’s the story of my travel day. I got to the airport nice and early – no stress there. The plane boarded and took off on time. That was too good to be true. Then we got to my connection city, Philly, and the notoriously congested airport was chaotic. We circled in the air for a good 25 minutes until we finally got clearance to land. Yeah. We’re already 25 minutes late and I only have a one hour layover. At this point I might be in danger of not having time to grab some dinner. And by the way, I didn’t get so much as one peanut or one pretzel on the plane. I had to pay $2 for my ginger ale and I really thought that purchase might score me a small bag of peanuts, but no such luck.

We are now on the ground, but there seemed to be a problem finding an available gate. So we sit there and wait. And wait some more. OK, now this is starting to get stressful. Nearly 30 minutes later the pilot announces that a gate just opened. This would literally leave me five minutes to make my connection. Luckily the plane was tiny and I was in the 10th row. I made it out with less than two minutes to spare. I made a mad dash sprint to my connecting gate, which thank God, was only five gates down from where we landed. I made it. No dinner, but all was well.

That plane was now delayed as we waited for baggage to get loaded. Cool, that MUST be MY bag we are all waiting for. Come to find out later that was wishful thinking. I sat down and settled in to what I hoped would be a relaxing flight. I opened my backpack, reached in for my book and found a soaking wet book. Oh my Lord, what happened? In my mad dash sprint to the gate, my water bottle popped open and 15 ounces of water poured into my backpack. Not only did I have a brand new book, but a journal that contained the first couple chapters of MY book . . . . and my beloved new MacBook Pro. I pulled the laptop out and water poured out of it. My heart sank into my toes. But there was nothing I could do for the next few hours.

I got to my room after 10PM, hungry, tired and with no luggage. All I could do was immediately turn on my computer and see what happens. The first thing I notice is the screen is pretty much destroyed. But it fired up so it wasn’t a total loss. However, none of the applications would start. My next course of action: call Karlo and cry.

After tossing and turning all night, worrying about my computer and how I would explain this accident, I had to get up early and run down to the convention center to bust my butt for 9 straight hours. I won’t even bore you with those details. On the brighter note, after taking a hairdryer to my computer for 15 minutes last night, it did fire up and the apps work today. I’m thanking my lucky stars for that. Perhaps I can just get away with a new screen. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.