05-NOV-A-9
THE TRIP TO
ORGANIZATIONAL
DIAGNOSIS COURSE OF THE ELDP
AS PART OF OUR
GRADUATE WORK LOAD FOR
THE COMING
SEMESTER CLOSE
November 10, 2005
FIASCO AT DCA
Let
me describe the joys of travel. Here I
am, the ideal passenger that a bankrupt airline should be trying to
cultivate. I have made no advance
purchase low rate fare, but asked for the first direct flight of the day to
Indianapolis and returning the same day—no luggage, and familiar with the
drill. I got up and drove down to GWU in
the highest speed commute I have made, since it is pre-dawn and there was
little traffic, even hitting all the lights right and catching the first of the
Metro trains after packing along only the interview questions for the Sensient
interviews. Ernie had called me after
having had the same commuting experience, arriving an hour and a half before he
expected to at Gate 36. But, one needs a
boarding pass to go through security and I went to the check in desk after
getting off Metro for the ^6:55 AM
flight 141. There was someone in
front of me trying to use the automated check in, so I waited—just one minute
too long.
When
I put in the credit card, it would not take it, and even when I added the
flight number it would not accept it. So,
I had to stand in line to see an agent, who explained that it was now within
thirty minutes from departure and they would not allow a check-in for that
flight as too close. It is 29 minutes
before takeoff, easily within the slippage time of one or more queues in which waiting
is required. I had to stand in another
line to get another ticket, he said, and after wafting through the line and
calling Ernie at the gate, I jumped the queue and got a boarding pass, running
to Security check. There was one short
line. Rather than tempt the fates, I took off my shoes, took the computer out
of the bag and put it in a separate plastic bin with my sport coat over
it. My luck would have a new security
trainee of the TSA at the controls of the screening camera. She was puzzled. She held up the line as Ernie waited at the
boarding gate. What she was puzzled
about was that there is some rule that the laptop cannot have anything in the same bin as it goes through so after
checking with several supervisors, it being her first day of work, and one of
the supervisor’s birthdays celebrated at the hour of 6:45 AM, I had to
wait. Finally I could put my shoes on,
and run to Gate 36 which was locked.
I
got a call from Ernie on the other side of the locked door, and was told that I
would have to go to a special services agent to re-book a flight to
Indianapolis if at all, as I could continue to talk with Ernie about thirty
feet away on the aircraft sitting at the gate.
That is where I now am, in a waiting queue for a re-booking of the next
flight which would have me coming through Charlotte to Indianapolis to arrive
at 12:41 PM missing the entire morning of evenly divided one-hour interviews
for each of us, Ernie and I. The
problem? They cannot book me on the flight
since the computer shows me on the flight still at the gate –the one I should
be on had it not been for the experimental TSA-trainee’s delay. So, what else would you like to know about
the joy of travels in the era-2005 in which the road warriors collide with the
post-9/11/01 hyper security rituals?
RETURN TO OFFICE AND CONDUCT INTERVIEWS
BY PHONE
My ticket
is a non-refundable one, and I will have to apply the price of these tickets to
a USAir flight sometime in the near future assuming that USAir is still on the
wing when I do it. I am unsure whether
any of the airlines in which I have accumulated air miles will still be flying
at the time I try to go somewhere. I
returned to GW and called as Ernie and Charles were getting together and I
divvied up the interviews after the first one was a no show. I conducted my interviews by phone and will
later rendezvous with Ernie to consolidate these for our report. Meanwhile, I at least got a couple of rolls
of film from the MCM and the first pictures of the
Now the
weekend approaches in which there will be a few runs, an Operation Lifeline
reunion and a few phone calls to be fielded in support of events elsewhere. One really neat thing arrived at my mailbox
after a day’s delay with the Veterans’ Day Postal Holiday—a packet of pictures
from Marathon Fotos in addition to the Proofs from which I was planning to
order a few. A fellow I had met at the
Expo before the race had interviewed me and found my pictures and pulled four
of them to print out showing the 25th MCM and 100th
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