Thursday Delay

Spent most of the day on Thursday in "Wittle Bitty Airport" ("WBA") in far Northern California waiting for a flight back to San Francisco, but Mother Nature had other things on her mind. My flight was supposed to depart at 10am, but as I am writing this, I'll be lucky if it takes off at 6:30pm. Long day....

I am writing to describe the day at a small airport. Some interesting and fun things happened.

First of all, I was very pleased that as small as WBA is, it offered free wi-fi. I was able to catch up on backed-up email and continue responding to things for work. So far, so good -- especially because I am so cheap that I refuse to buy a smart phone and pay the monthly ransom that wireless carriers demand.

I stood near the door for about five hours and interviewed people about what they did up in this area of the country on March 11. There was a serious disaster threat going on that day, and I wanted to know what they heard, what they did, and what they thought about it. I interviewed over 250 people. And yeah, this *is* related to my job. Very interesting commentary!

I took breaks from time to time, as standing for hours is not my choice of "fun." I got lunch, took a walk, and fired up the laptop to deal with more e-mail.

Most people took me very seriously when I stopped to ask if they had a minute to answer a couple questions. I guess having an official "Big Brother" I.D. helps, but a few of them told me that they thought I was "official" not because of the I.D., but because I was wearing leather jeans with a blue stripe down the side.

Heck, I hadn't even thought of that! I just put these leathers as I was dressing because: a) they are warm (and it was cold); b) they are comfortable; c) I was going to San Francisco, after all. I wasn't even thinking of the perceptions by the non-leather straight crowd that wearing leather jeans with a stripe down the side could be interpreted as anything other than an interesting pair of leather jeans. Okay, SK, you've convinced me why I need to have breeches with no stripes when I ride around with my club. Got it.

I saw about 20 or so guys with boots on, and about half of them were wearing tall rubber boots. After all, the primary industry in this area of the country is fishing, and tall rubber boots are worn by guys who do that work. There were about 5 guys in tall logger boots, and obviously, these guys were in the logging industry. The rest of the boots that I saw on guys were black harness boots. No cowboy boots, and far too many sneakers for my taste, but at least there were not any men wearing those horrid crocks or flip-flops or yuppie sandals.

All-in-all, I made the best of the day that I could, and did things related to my job so I would earn a day's pay while postponing the meetings scheduled for Thursday to Friday, since I realized pretty early on that the entire day would be shot. Oh well, that's how things go sometimes.

Life is short: make the best of it.