Here I am standing in line at LAX for the third time in seven months.
After working for 30 years, I had an event happen this week that I never had happen before.
I covered around 12,000 miles in less than 48 hours. In essence, I flew to China, landed for 12 hours, then immediately flew back to the USA.
There’s a whole lot of flying happening here.
In 30 years, I have done a lot of travel. The travel really started to take off when I joined IBM back in the early 90s. I remember on one occasion, I went platinum almost immediately one year because I was flying coast to coast almost every weekend.
I am well over a million miles worth of flying. I have never tried to target all my flying at just one airline, so I have miles all over the place. This is a bit too bad, because once you get a million miles on any airline, generally they give you Gold status for life. This is nice because it allows you to board the airplane before other people, and make sure all your bags are tucked away.
However, with all of this flying, I have never spent almost 30 hours of flying and travelling in 48 hours of time.
So, how did this happen?
I am currently on a special project aimed on integration of another company at my work. This is extra work piled on top of my normal day to day work. Because of this work, members on this special team are generally not travelling a lot. I had a trip scheduled to go to China to spend a week there, and I was forced to cancel just a couple of weeks ago. In reality, I thought I had cancelled but a certain important customers said, "[Theologic] must come to China!"
Now, they don’t call me Theologic, but for purposes of this blog, Theologic is the right name. This request got kicked around for a while, then finally, it got kicked up to a couple senior VPs, who then made a decision 48 hours before I needed to fly that "Yes, you must go."
The one thing that I asked for was business class. We are trying to save costs, and company flies us in economy, which many of us will upgrade with frequent flier miles to business class. I am remarkably healthy for a man that is 53 years old, but the one issue that I will have from time to time is a back problem that crops up when I am in a narrow airline seat for an extended time. I find that I have zero issue in business class, but a real problem in economy. The problem is that the trip was booked so close to the leaving date that I did not have time to use my miles.
Fortunately, the management agreed this was a requirement for me, so I got the business class. In retrospect, it was well worth it because I used a substantial amount of flight time to do work. The trip was 10x more successful because I had time to work on my customer pitch because I had no time to work on it before I left due to the double booking of responsibilities.
So, travel was madly booked, and on Friday afternoon, I had my plans. It looked something like this.
Sunday at 7:30pm - Limo to pick up and take to airport
Sunday at 10:30pm – Flight leaves
Tuesday at 6:00am – Plane lands in Hong Kong
Then I drove to Shenzhen. If you are curious, the map from my Google maps app looked like this:
This is where it is a little interesting. The person that works for me in China had arranged a driver to get me to Shenzhen. I told my employee that this would just be fine, as I had been on internal flights a lot. When we got to China border crossing with Hong Kong, we went through the Hong Kong station just fine. But then when we got to the China side, the driver parked in front of a building, and typed something into Google translate.
After 5 minutes, which means that Google translate is not perfect, I figured out that my driver wanted me to go through the building and clear customs in the building. Afterwards, I found out that this was a faster way, because they would let the China driver through quick, but if I was in the car, it would slow down.
I was pretty disheveled, but some how I got inside the building and stood in the line. There were a few Americans in the line, including somebody with a big golf bag. I took the photo below, although I’m sure the China government would scold me for taking any photos inside the building. But I wanted to remember the transfer.
Took a shower in my employee’s hotel room. Met with the customer in a series of meetings.
Tuesday at 3:00 pm – Limo back to airport
Tuesday at midnight – Leave back to USA
Tuesday at 8:30pm – Arrive USA
Tuesday at 10:00pm – Arrive at Home
The most miserable part of the trip was actually in the airport lounge on the way home. I arrived in the Hong Kong airport at about 4:30pm. I went up to the ticket counter to be checked in, and the counter lady said, "Wow, you are going to spend a long time in the airport lounge." I asked if there was any earlier flights, but the midnight flight out of Hong Kong buy Cathay Pacific was their only direct to LAX.
Here I am standing inside the Hong Kong airport. Interestingly, they have a mock up of the Wright brothers, just like the airport in Minnesota.
At around 7pm to 9pm in Hong Kong, my body knew that my actual clock was saying "Hey, its in the middle of the night! Why aren’t you a sleep?" Now, the Cathay Pacific business lounge isn’t all that bad, and it is much better than just hanging out inside of a terminal. However, it really is not all that good. The food is not great, and it is the only business class lounge in the world where they don’t have ice for your drinks.
However, the worst part is that they really don’t have a good place to put up your feet and sleep. They have some overstuffed chairs, and I made due the best that I could. However, I fear that I was snoring due to the weird angle of my neck, and I would wake up every 30 to 40 minutes feeling like I had the wrong parts of the chair poking into me.
I did sleep on and off, and before midnight I headed to the plane.
The trip back was uneventful. I slept another 4 or 5 hours, and watched just an amazing amounts of movies. I was really bushed, and I didn’t do any work.
Now, the story really gets interesting. I landed in LAX, and I flew through customs. It turns out that nobody else was landing at the same time, and I went cruising through the lines. I went out on the exit ramp, and my limo driver was right there. (A nice woman who had been driving for 14 years, and used to take wedding photos on the weekends, but now mainly just driving. Every person is unique and has a story.)
I tell my limo driver that I want to call my wife. My wife doesn’t answer the home phone, because she is picking up my boy from a last night practice, and my wife isn’t picking up her cell phone. One of the cool apps that I have placed on my family’s phone is Life360. This allows you to see where your family members are currently located.
So, I look on the map, and my wife is currently getting onto the freeway on San Juan Capistrano. I know that she is about 15 minutes away from home, and I try and call her agaiin. She does not answer. I call in 5 more minutes. I look at the 360 apps, and I see she is still getting onto the freeway in SJC. This has happened before. The app doesn’t always register the latest position. So, I wait 15 minutes and call home.
My wife answers, and I ask her, "Where is your cell phone?" She states that it must be out in the car. So, I tell her to go out to the car, and I’ll call her so she can find it. I call her cell, but she calls me back on the home phone.
"I can’t find it," she says. "I think that I left in at the fast food place that I picked up dinner." However, I knew that I just saw an update of her phone as getting on the ramp at SJC. I say I’ll call her back. I look at the 360 app, and she is still getting onto the ramp at SJC.
I immediately thought to myself, "My wife put her cell phone on top of the car, and the accleration of getting on the freeway threw the phone off."
I call her back and ask her if she could have placed the cell phone on top of the car. She says that she doesn’t think so. So, we go through step by step instructions of how to have her use Google and Android cell phone manager to get where Google thinks her phone is. (By the way, this is brilliant. If you have Gmail on your phone, you can log into Google, then type "Where Is My Phone?" Google will then find your phone using cell towers and GPS.
My wife is not very computer literate, but we walked her through this. (I was still in the limo coming home, and I know the limo driver was listening.) After a while, Google comes back with a map.
"Oh," says my wife. "It looks like it is at school."
"Look closer," I say.
"Actually, it looks like it is on the ramp going to the Freeway. But that can’t be true. I’m pretty sure I left it at the fast food place."
We have a discussion, and while I wasn’t horrible cross, my wife knew that I was very unhappy. A lot of this was due to the fact that I really had been worn down by the long trip. This is actually the time that my wife needs me most, so I tried to keep it bottled up some. It really was the worst time for her to lose the phone.
"Tell the kids that we are going out when I get home in 10 minutes," I told her.
She felt very bad, and tried to tell me that it could wait until the morning. This only made me madder because there was no way that we should put this off for another 12 hours of more. We need to get it resolved now.
I didn’t say much, but I said that we were going to get the phone now.
The Limo driver dropped me off, and my wife and I immediately got into our Prius. The good Lord must have known that I was cranky and had given me enough for the night, because the drive to the place where it was showing up on Life360 was clear. We got off of the Freeway, crossed the bridge, and immediately got onto the circular ramp entering back on the freeway going the other way. I was assuming that as my wife had gone around the corner, the centripital force push the phone to the outside of the ramp. We parked by the side of the ramp, and I looked at my phone. It showed the location of my wife’s phone much closer to the freeway. So, I eased the car around the ramp, and was right before the freeway. I looked over and there was a little white thing on the pavement.
I got out of the car, and told my wife to look for cars coming screaming around the corner just about ready to get onto the freeway. Now I’ll admit that I was just a little bit excited. The phone was lying on the pavement face down, but it was in the center of the lane. According to my wife, she had just been here 80 minutes before. The phone had been translating its position, so I knew that it was still operating. I thought maybe, just maybe, the phone had been missed by the hundreds of drivers coming onto the freeway.
I picked up the phone, and turned it over. The screen was smashed into a thousand tiny flakes, and a little LED light was still flashing in the corner.
Now, I shouldn’t have said it, but I reminded my wife that we had just flushed a couple of hundred dollars down the toilet. She felt bad enough, but I wasn’t very happy. I was extremely tired. My only attempt to make it better was to mention that at least it wasn’t an iPhone, and it wasn’t $500.
We got home in record time, somewhere around 10:50 or so. I knew my wife needed a phone for the next day, so I told her to try and find the parts of the old Windows phone that I had bought two years ago. She showed up with some parts, and I put them together. Then I removed the memory card and the SIM from the smash phone. The good thing is that we were able to recover these, so making the transfer was pretty painless.
By the time we got to bed, I had mellowed out a bit because I now knew the fate of the phone. I pulled my wife over to my side, and she gave me a hug.
"I’m sorry about the phone," she said.
"I’m sorry to be tired and grumpy," I replied.
Then we fell asleep.
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