Week 228: The Wrong Houston
And now a classic from the old blogspot days: the vacation travelogue gone wrong.
It’s Tuesday night, I'm sitting in the parking lot of the Dollar General in Houston, PA. I'm getting my houseguest a six-pack of diet soda, since I don't drink that. And I’m thinking that if I hadn’t ended up in the wrong Houston this week, I’d be able to make a lot more sense.
Prologue: On last Sunday, I was suddenly awakened by a call from my mother, telling me that my dad had called from the hospital and she was not to come down because they were looking for somebody. My mother was of course concerned that my father had had another stroke, but no, this was actually the crazy bit. Because the shooter had worked in nutrition at facilities, he has a loose connection to the next adjacent facility to his workplace, and yes in fact the investigators were traversing his web of contacts to see if there was anyone with any connection to him in the facility. After about fifteen minutes of interviews they left, and that was my father’s brush with the second craziest event of last week.
Friday, I found myself trapped in the third-craziest story of the week. We were scheduled to fly out to my wife’s annual sales conference with another couple and Catie. And you already know where this is going: we heard there were issues, but went to the airport, and spent an hour in the line at the airport only to be told in passing that the flight from Texas never made it there, so our flight had been cancelled since 5am. The only airline flying out of Pittsburgh today is Southwest, and their flights are all full. If we wanted to fly Saturday, we’d get into Houston at 5pm, and miss the first half of the conference, and pay three times over our hopefully to be refunded tickets. At this point I did the math, having done the figures when we rejected the idea of driving a year earlier. It’s 22 hours driving straight through to Texas, and we’d gain a hour in transit, but we’d just make the opening meeting. That is if we had a car we trusted to drive 22 hours straight through. All our cars were in need of new tires soon. So we had to find a car rental. They went down to scout for a car rental, cancel our rental in Texas, and I was sent back to the airline desk to figure out the possibility of a prompt refund. Once I determined that there was no way we would know about that, I went down to car rentals where they had already gotten the van.
I drove back with the other couple to get them back to our house, where their car could be stored for free, and we tried to get on the road. Here was the next problem. Because I was the smallest one in the party, I was given the middle seat in the second row seating. The third row was folded down for luggage. And the drive train elevated the floor right at the middle seat. So I was basically folded up in a position where I couldn’t move my feet, which were about three inches below my butt. My knees were both over bent and in the air, and my back was unsupported but I was leaning backwards in such a way that I felt like I was constantly losing my balance. The passengers on either side of me were butting into my shoulders with theirs so I had nowhere to move my arms except tightly in front of me. After two miles I knew this was going to be trouble. By five miles, I realized that my feet and hands were tingling from lack of circulation. By the PA line, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to hold this position for 22 minutes, much less 22 hours. And so with a heavy heart, and knowledge that we couldn’t get the third row seat up around the luggage, I asked to be let out and abandoned at the Sheetz in Triadelphia.
As sad as it sounds it was the right call. Of the five people going to Texas in our party, I was the least essential to the conference, and as I was upstairs, I did not present my license at the rental counter. I could follow along with the conference because there were people doing it remotely, and more would be coming that way due to the airlines. The only thing I was absolutely missing out on was a factory tour, and while I felt bad about that, I could comfort myself that I might not have been able to walk the floor if I’d been in that seat all the way down.
Getting out of the car at that point required me to support myself with my arms for several minutes while the numbness subsided. I sat at the outdoor table there and tried to remember whether my ride had been told the westbound or eastbound Sheetz at that exit. I was walking with a limp for a couple hours afterwards, and after I got transportation home, I got sized up by my houseguest as looking like I had a miserable time.
For about two weeks now, John, Catie’s dad and Dana’s ex-husband has been staying with us. He’s recovering from a fall which resulted in an eye injury, so he’s using our spare bedroom to convalesce. Longtime readers might recall his previous time with us recovering from shoulder surgery. So we had a housesitter in place for this vacation, and I was not supposed to be it. We’d prepared about two weeks worth of meals for him, so we split out some leftovers and I made dinner, before we each retired to a different end of the house. Leftovers didn’t taste like What-A-Burger. Leftovers probably didn’t taste like Buc-ee’s. Leftovers just tasted like yesterday’s dinner.
I’ll mention there’s an inherent awkwardness in this relationship when we’re both worried about them. We both wanted updates, but which of us they called first became a slight power game. I didn’t want it to be that, because they’re the people we care about, and we wanted to know they were safe, and we were usually in eavesdropping distance. I felt I was getting an unfair advantage as Catie called me for updates about her cat, that he was eating, and safe, and tucked in for the night. As I said, it was a slight power game, by the second night, we both realized Dewey was the one she wanted to check in on.
After dinner, I corralled the increasingly despondent dog under the bedcovers, and tried to sleep. The dog began a ten-minute cycle: stand up, realize Mommy wasn’t there, bolt out to the kitchen, circle around the counter looking for Mommy, get a drink, run to the bathroom, look for Mommy, and then reluctantly conclude she wasn’t home yet, and leaned up against spare parent to get five minutes sleep. I kept covering him up and putting him next to me to calm him down, but this continued until about 4. By that time, I realized we had trimmed the AC down, and the house was running at 74 degrees, explaining his activity and my sleeplessness.
They made it to Sugar Land 10 am local time, by which point the opening session was wrapping up. I had watched the session and took notes for them from my small screen, but my notes wouldn’t make sense without seeing the recording. The keynote address has been our particular bugaboo the past few years, I’ve been sitting there recording notes while Dana has had to wrestle with various problems: (a lemon of a car rental, a head cold, and flight cancellation.) and I have never felt that we’ve never given enough weight to the economic data out of that session, because it’s always thirdhand information reviewed weeks later. That was part of why I was so mentally pained by giving up on getting there. I didn’t want to be in the position I was in that morning again, having to convey all the information from just a note on paper. That night, I basically ordered the party in Sugar Land to watch the rebroadcast and call me before going to bed. I wasn’t able to convey all my notes, but I at least got them to start discussing the implications among themselves. Well, at least there’s that.
While they did that, I went to my office to work with the HR system and reverse my vacation in the system. I knew I wouldn’t want to stay at home for Monday and Tuesday, the lack of rain has stalled out the yard work, and I didn’t want to be sitting at home stewing over not travelling. I was also wary that I needed to cancel the vacation immediately since the old system didn’t allow cancellations of vacations on the day they were taken, so I needed to get it done before Monday. Having to go this extra mile just to clean up a mess that had already landed on me once was enervating, and I went to bed shortly after getting back home.
One of the traditions of my vacations is the house disaster while I’m away. In past years I’ve come back to the air conditioning stuck at 78, come back to the TV stuck on channel 28, and come back to the refrigerator breaking its compressor, and having to throw out most of the contents (okay this was actually twice with two separate refrigerators.) Most of these also have involved calming the housesitter down as she thought it was something she had done. (only the TV was actually that.) So on Sunday morning like clockwork, as watched the first hour of breakout sessions, I realized that I had heard a loud bang, and the video feed froze and the laptop was using its battery. Yup, power’s out, and it’s going to hit 91 today.
I did a quick survey of the grounds to see what the situation was. Neither the generator at my parents’ house nor the one across the street were loud, so neither house was off. That limited the range of the problem to four houses, and two lines, and the simultinaity of the noise made it sound like mechanical failure. I figured that there would be a problem getting someone on a Sunday for a very small system failure, but surprisingly the power company only took about 40 minutes to get there, and confirm that there was a short across the equipment that wouldn’t have been there except for the squirrel. At least it was quick. And no one had to come home to the house disaster.
Though it was my turn to miss the breakout sessions, I got to watch them being rebroadcast in the afternoon, and I really got to see all I could of Sunday being remote. I did miss the factory tour, but they did photograph a good bit of the tour for me, (the part that was not IP.) So I got to see some of what I was going to go for. Best I can expect under the circumstances.
I was at least sleeping better, or maybe I was just being ignorant of the dog’s cycles. He was still doing searches for his Mommy every ten minutes, but he was tiring himself out faster. He stayed under the cover after midnight Sunday.
When I went back into the office Monday, I discovered that the tinkering with the HR vacation system had worked, but I had actually removed the whole week, including the previous Friday, meaning I had managed to break the system. This is why they keep me around as a tester. I’m just that good at blundering through holes in the software, any software. I quickly reinstated the Friday vacation request, and informed HR of the fact that you could defraud them, but that was not my intent. That should keep them busy.
Driving home that night, I resolved to take some sort of action. Rather than eat the leftovers, I resolved to do something with the gardening. I’ve been growing a pot of Swiss chard of a variety called Perpetual spinach, with a trellis for a variety of Malabar spinach surrounding it. While watering the pots to stave off the drought of July, I noticed there was enough chard to make beginner level spanakopita, and while picking up prescriptions for everyone, I grabbed puff pastry to complete the recipe. Full of intent, I charged into the house, turned on the oven, and went out to clip the leaves, and discovered that the deer had been there. A long, deflating sigh, and I turned off the oven and got another tray of leftovers out of the fridge.
The one positive thing I can say about this week is I actually managed to get some things accomplished when the world wasn’t descending into madness. I outlined a section of the book and began stitching some of the old content from here into it. I started about ten index cards to add to the study guides for the team, and I wrote a bunch of the lessons I would like to present to them this year. I got to search through newspapers for senior college choices, and I polished up a plan for marketing for the whole year. I should feel some sense of accomplishment or relief getting ahead of schedule, and yet I still feel like the air’s been let out of me, like I know the effort won’t matter for long.
This morning I woke up to their van pulling up, doing the 22 hour drive in approximately 21. As Dana got to show off to the rest of the team all my hard work with the plants, I noticed that the spinach had been bitten down still more, as well as a pepper plant, a tomato plant, and two strawberry plants. I shook my fist at the deer in the field, and prepared to start my day. The dog walked out from the bed, saw his Mommy, and having confirmed she was back, went right back under the covers.
Just at twilight tonight, as I was walking back home through the field, I saw a guy speeding up the one-lane road. Out of nowhere, the same deer I shook my fist at walked in front of the car and bounced twenty feet over. The deer ran off but isn’t going to survive that. The driver didn’t notice us yelling at him to stop and get checked out, and tore off down the road toward the dead end. A lot of things in this world are just interacting very fast and very dumb at random.
I will note that Questions Unlimited will be under new management from now on. I appear to be one of the few people my age who got involved in quiz bowl without ever playing in the format, so I never developed the loyalty or anathema to their tournaments. Divorced from those perspectives, I'd always seen Chip as a salesman, pushing his brand, and frankly I could at least respect the hustle. I knew I had a better product, but I couldn't make a better connection with his customers.
That said, I am rather happy that this will not involve a search and rescue operation on my part. As I've mentioned here before, the process of trying to find all the customers of a question provider is rather painful, and having done it four times in the past year, I wasn't looking forward to the possibility of a fifth. Retirement and transfer of assets is by far a better choice. I had drafted an unsatisfactory plan for such an operation last year; I try for Batman levels of preparedness. I'm rather glad not to have to act on it, especially when there are other fish to fry next month.