"9:27 is a good time. That's when my daughters were born. I bet you can get us there by 9:27". That left 27 minutes for the taxi driver to deliver us from the San Jose airport to the San Francisco airport. The three of us had originally been booked on a 9:30 America West flight to Las Vegas, connecting to a flight to Newark, just outside of New York City. When I arrived at the San Jose airport at about 8:30, I was informed that the Las Vegas flight was delayed indefinitely, the circumstances unknown. Instead, the ticket agent found a Continental Airlines flight leaving at 10:00 out of San Francisco for me and two other Newark-bound passengers waiting at the counter. If we got on a taxi immediately, we might be able to make make the flight.
The taxi driver accepted the challenge, and and we cruised along the outskirts of San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Mateo on 101, dodging in and out of traffic. The taxi pulled up at 9:32, missing the target time by 5 minutes, but nevertheless, we were all able to check in without a problem. For bureaucratic reasons, one of my companions was given all three boarding passes, since the airline transfer slip was made out with all three of our names on it. No problem, I'm just going to be following them to the gate, anyway.
The security at SFO must have been pretty bored that night; there was almost nobody in the terminal. To make things more interesting, they selected me for a random bag screening. As I went through the inspection, the guy with my boarding pass was already on the way to the gate; he wanted to get there to try and upgrade to first class.
The security screening didn't take all that much time; a metal detector scan, a little rifling through bags, and some explosives detection swabs. But I started to get a little nervous, since the plane was supposed to be leaving in less than 10 minutes at this point. "Great packing job," the security man tells me. "It was," I think to myself as I realized I didn't even know what gate my flight was leaving from.
I finally got cleared through security, and I found my flight on the information TV screens. I ran down the concourse to the gate, and fortunately, the fellow with my boarding pass was waiting there for me.
At airports, they have two places where you can get screened for dangerous substances. The first is at the metal detectors that everyone goes through, where they pull travellers at random to check. The second is at the airline gate. At this stage, they target their inspections to people with "suspicious" travel patterns. This includes people who purchase one-way tickets, who don't pay with a credit card, and who purchase their tickets at the last minute. Since our Continental ticket was transferred from another airline, it was issued as one-way, was purchased through an exchange program between airlines, and was booked an hour before the flight departed.
So all three of us were chosen for the pre-boarding baggage inspection. Up went the arms, off went the shoes, and my perfect packing job went to waste.
On the bright side, the airplane wasn't very full, and I got the whole row to myself. This was a red-eye flight, meaning it left late at night from the west and arrived early in the morning in the east. In this case, it was leaving at 10pm, and arriving at 6am, which, because of time zones, meant a 5-hour flight. The very unfortunate part of red-eye flights is that, at the very most, you can only get about 4 hours of sleep. In addition, you get in at 6am, which is really too late to go to a hotel and get a few more hours sleep. So instead of sacrificing a day of activities to fly across the country, you sacrifice a night of sleep. As an engineer, though, you're used to doing that once in a while.
The taxi driver accepted the challenge, and and we cruised along the outskirts of San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Mateo on 101, dodging in and out of traffic. The taxi pulled up at 9:32, missing the target time by 5 minutes, but nevertheless, we were all able to check in without a problem. For bureaucratic reasons, one of my companions was given all three boarding passes, since the airline transfer slip was made out with all three of our names on it. No problem, I'm just going to be following them to the gate, anyway.
The security at SFO must have been pretty bored that night; there was almost nobody in the terminal. To make things more interesting, they selected me for a random bag screening. As I went through the inspection, the guy with my boarding pass was already on the way to the gate; he wanted to get there to try and upgrade to first class.
The security screening didn't take all that much time; a metal detector scan, a little rifling through bags, and some explosives detection swabs. But I started to get a little nervous, since the plane was supposed to be leaving in less than 10 minutes at this point. "Great packing job," the security man tells me. "It was," I think to myself as I realized I didn't even know what gate my flight was leaving from.
I finally got cleared through security, and I found my flight on the information TV screens. I ran down the concourse to the gate, and fortunately, the fellow with my boarding pass was waiting there for me.
At airports, they have two places where you can get screened for dangerous substances. The first is at the metal detectors that everyone goes through, where they pull travellers at random to check. The second is at the airline gate. At this stage, they target their inspections to people with "suspicious" travel patterns. This includes people who purchase one-way tickets, who don't pay with a credit card, and who purchase their tickets at the last minute. Since our Continental ticket was transferred from another airline, it was issued as one-way, was purchased through an exchange program between airlines, and was booked an hour before the flight departed.
So all three of us were chosen for the pre-boarding baggage inspection. Up went the arms, off went the shoes, and my perfect packing job went to waste.
On the bright side, the airplane wasn't very full, and I got the whole row to myself. This was a red-eye flight, meaning it left late at night from the west and arrived early in the morning in the east. In this case, it was leaving at 10pm, and arriving at 6am, which, because of time zones, meant a 5-hour flight. The very unfortunate part of red-eye flights is that, at the very most, you can only get about 4 hours of sleep. In addition, you get in at 6am, which is really too late to go to a hotel and get a few more hours sleep. So instead of sacrificing a day of activities to fly across the country, you sacrifice a night of sleep. As an engineer, though, you're used to doing that once in a while.
