Why travel isn't fun

pjf on 2004-06-12T04:08:33

Travel
Whenever I mention that I'm going away to another city, everyone always acts like it's very nice to have a job that involves frequent travel. It isn't. Departure lounges are boring places. Airplanes are cramped and uncomfortable, and waiting for luggage is awful. Today, particularly so.

It takes an hour to fly from Melbourne to Sydney. However today it's taken at least another hour for them to be able to unpack the luggage from the plane. I say at least another hour, as I've been on the ground for eighty minutes and the luggage still hasn't arrived, and isn't showing any signs of doing so.

The excuse? A thunderstorm. I'm not sure why planes are allowed to do the dangerous task of landing in thunderstorms, but bags cannot be unpacked, but that apparently seems to be the case. The voice-over has just upgraded the wait to an 'indefinite delay'. There's about 400-500 people waiting for their bags with me, and they're nowhere near as happy as I am. I have a copy of Half-Life in my bag, Proc::UID to work upon, and a course to review.

I'm not going to get the fiendishly bad-for-you doughnuts that were doing to be tonight's highlight, though. The store closes in three minutes, and is on the other side of town.

I do have wireless access, but it's a walled-city affair -- I can read about how wonderful the airport is. However DNS works. I really have to get IP-tunneled-via-DNS happening.

Update: The other airline doesn't seem to have anyone waiting. Lucky them. Maybe only Virgin Blue staff are afraid of thunderstorms?

Tomorrow
Tomorrow I'll be teaching Intermediate Perl, and squeezing in a lunchtime meeting with a potential client. They're an Australian distributor for some huge e-commerce package written entirely in Perl, and are thrilled about the idea of having someone write them customisations and train their customers. Lunchtime is a rotten time for the meeting, as it's when I'd normally be relaxing, reviewing, and using some crippled internet connection to post this journal entry.

All this assumes that I actually get my bags, and the airport doesn't have us come back in the morning to collect them.

Unlike my normal arrangements, I'm not flying back tomorrow night. Instead, I'm flying back Saturday morning. That gives me a little bit of a more relaxed schedule, but there's not much I really want to do in Sydney to be relaxed about.

General Geekiness
You may be in a geek household when you watch Venus transitting the sun on xplanet.

Pets
Shadow found a way into the neighbours backyard today. He seemed very pleased with himself, and apparently set about eating the lettuce and other good things in their vegie patch. We took him back home, found what we thought was the hole in the fence, and filled it in. Hopefully he won't be bad while we're in Sydney, as I'm not sure how we'll retrieve him from interstate.

Course-writing
I should be writing changes for my security course at the moment. That would be a good use of time. It's due for printing in just over a week, and needs a lot more material to be long enough for a day-long tutorial. That I'm ending this journal entry here is probably a sign that I've realised just how close the due-date happens to be.

Update Luggage is finally running at 10:20, two hours after the flight landed.