WWDC Sunday - Arriving

Sunday was an interesting day filled with goofs and gaffs and almost an entire disregard for computer safety guidelines.  

My flights were fairly uneventful, I ended up transferring in Dallas/Ft. Worth and half way through that flight my hand shook as I was holding a drink and I ended up soaking the guy sitting next to me with Coke.  He was nicer about it than I would have been and took the whole thing in stride.  My headache and my tremors kept getting worse as I gathered my luggage and got on the BART.  I just wanted to get back to the hotel room where I could take some pills then go get registered and get a bite to eat before crashing.  It was a good, very innocuous plan that shouldn't have gone horribly awry.  But, in line with the first rule of travel, and computers, and according to Robert Burns (if you don't know who I'm referring to look him up as he relates to mice), things fall apart.

I arrived at at the correct Bart stop and didn't hear the conductor (do you call them conductors?) announce the stop until the train was about to depart.  I exited the train just in time to see the doors close. . . with my laptop sitting on the floor . . . right next to the seat I was occupying 5 seconds earlier.  Oh, the horror, as well as having a several programs on it, I also had all of my music, all of my photos and stored VPN data.  Needless to say, the first thing I did was run up the stairs right to the security booth and blather on for 20 minutes about how I left it on and how I had to get it back.

After doing nothing to calm my fears at all the woman told me that she should know in two hours if someone had turned it in or not.  I subsequently checked back with her every hour and I have to say, this woman had more patience than any human being alive.  She was understanding, soft spoken, and wasn't afraid to tell me that most of the time such items were never found again.  I thanked her and promised to come back in two hours.  Thirty minutes later, of course, I was back, as worked up as I was before.  It payed off.  10 minutes before she was to be off duty someone turned it in to a station at the end of the line.  She congratulated me and put me on the next BART to the end of the line.  Worse than this, I hadn't realized that my pills, the very thing I could not ever leave behind on such a day were in the same bag with my computer.  These pills have a street value that roughly rivals that of my computer.  I was not only lucky, but, I believe that I should have played the lottery on that day.  At the very least I would have avoided the possibility of being stoned to death (Shirley Jackson).  I suppose the luck I could have used would have been to not leave the computer on the train on the first place but on the bright side, as I said, I got it back.  My bag, the drugs I needed so badly, and not a single thing was damaged or missing.  Talk about your all time good luck.

And Probably the most amazing thing was how long it took from arriving until I could actually eat dinner.  I arrived at 12:55 p.m. and I got back to my hotel at roughly 8:30 p.m.  One small mistake cost me almost 8 hours of tired hungry and worried frenzy.  Not that I'm complaining, hell, I'm just glad to have my computer back.

I walked down to the nearest fast food (yack in the box) and grabbed a giant bacon cheeseburger and fries and a strawberry soda and finished them in a frenzy in my hotel room.  I passed out with the cup in my hand.  Tomorrow HAD to be better... right?

It was.  Much better, though abuse to my computer system didn't abate as I'd hoped, it actually picked up a notch on monday.  But I'll get to that in mondays entry.  Until then I'll leave you with a quote.