Sometimes, you're just having a day...

Yesterday, about 5 minutes before I was to walk out of my office to drive down to Mountain View to teach my pro bono GMAT class, I got a call from my sister.

"Dad just died," she said. She was as upset as I've ever heard her.

Me, I went instantly numb. That's my reflexive response to anything like that. We hung up, and I listened to my voicemails. Sure enough, mom had called 15 minutes prior, while I'd been on the phone with a new family we're going to be working with. The message was nearly two minutes of my mom sounding really freaked out while talking to what I presume were the 911 paramedics, before finally realizing that she'd been talking into my voicemail and telling me to call her right away.

That's a great message to listen to.

Without a way to get in touch with the students in my class, I just went down there and taught. On the way, I spoke briefly with mom, who had left the house for a couple of hours and come back to find my dad on the floor without a pulse. She called 911 and they tried to resuscitate him, but couldn't.

I told Joel the news, and he volunteered to do the research and buy my plane ticket to StL while I taught the class. I pushed them extra hard, since I knew that at the end I'd be canceling our Wed class. I opted not to tell them anything until the end because I didn't want it to distract from our focus. They're good kids, and they need all the help they can get on this test. They're the kids in Google's minority intern program.

After class, I headed back to the office to get everything put together to leave for the students that I'd now have to cancel lessons with for the rest of the week. I left the office around 11, and picked up Joel. He volunteered to drive while I was on the phone with Laszlo.

On the drive home, the power steering went out on the car.

That's a bit of a problem, since we live on the other side of a coastal mountain range, whose one road over is super windy. Steering a 2.5-ton vehicle with no hydraulic assist is a real pain. The car was scheduled to go in Wed morning anyway, since at least one of the bearings is failing, but Joel and I switched and I got us home while negotiating the turns as best I could.

Joel had gotten me a ticket out of Oakland at 6am. While the original plan had been for him to drive me to Oakland, in light of the failing steering we decided to drop me at the Daly City BART. The plan to get to the Oakland airport via public transportation involved the following:

1) leave the house at 330am
2) catch the 409am Bay point train at Daly city
3) catch the 438am Fremont train at Oakland city center
4) catch the 5am shuttle from Oakland coliseum to the airport

Since we got home around midnight, for the next 3.5 hours I sent the remaining emails I needed in order to be able to keep everything with work running for 5 days, and also cleaned the house and my room. Shara and her band of HS Latin phenoms is coming out to CA this weekend for her birthday and a Latin conference. They're all staying at the beachhouse. We've been planning this for months. Unfortunately, now I won't be there when they come. And I had scheduled all the cleaning for Thursday night. But I had to get it all done, and have the place in shape for her to stay there without my being there.

Then it was time to head to the airport. I drove us to Daly City, and got there at 408am. Fortunately, I managed to scamper onto the train just before the doors shut. I got to Oakland city center just as scheduled, but the 438 train was 10 minutes late. That meant not making the 5am shuttle, but we'd anticipated that, and the 520am shuttle would still get me there at 535am, which should be enough time to get to the gate, since Oakland is a small airport and Joel had checked me in.

But then, somewhere along the line, the train just stopped. The operator came on and said there was a maintenance crew on the tracks and we wouldn't be able to move until they were out of the way. However, he assured us, that would only be 2-3 minutes.

20 minutes later, the train started moving again. I missed the 520am shuttle.

That meant catching the 540am shuttle, which got me to the airport at 555am. For a 605am flight. I ran through the airport, flew through security, ran down the hall, and got to the gate at 603am. And saw a line of people at the gate. "Yes!", I thought, "The plane is delayed!"

Turns out, it was delayed because something was wrong with the landing gear. Not a good sign. And sure enough, about an hour later they announced that the flight was canceled. And what's more, the 730 and 10am flights were all full. Since this was Delta, everything routed through Salt Lake City, and for some reason it was a busy day flying from Oakland.

So, they sent us all back out to the ticket counter. Eventually I worked my way up to the head of the line, and the woman there got me booked on a 1210pm flight out of San Jose airport, routing through Minneapolis, and arriving in StL at 9pm, rather than 130pm. I was not happy.

What's more, San Jose airport is nowhere close to Oakland, so they gave me a voucher for a shuttle to San Jose. I went outside, where it was foggy and cold as shit, and shivered waiting for my shuttle. 3 came and went, but all were going to SFO, not San Jose. After an hour of shivering, I was ready to bully my way onto the next SFO shuttle and take the CalTrain from there to San Jose. But then the San Jose shuttle finally arrived.

I got to San Jose in plenty of time, but then that flight ended up delayed. The flight itself was uneventful, but because of the delay I ended up in Minneapolis with 10 minutes to get from G concourse to C concourse to make my connection to StL. Once again I was running through an airport. Halfway across the airport, I glanced up at the departure screen as I was rushing by and saw that *that* flight was also delayed. Now that Delta and Northwest airlines are the same, it appears we can safely assume that Delta will be following Northwest's operational strategy of never actually having a flight depart on time, ever. Though, to be fair, in this case it benefited me.

I walked the rest of the way to the gate, and discovered that the inbound plane was delayed because of weather en route, and we didn't know when it would arrive. It ended up being about an hour and a half late, and we made up a little of that en route to StL.

Departure time, my house in HMB: 330am PST
Arrival time, Cousin Anne's in StL: 11pm CST

Total door-to-door trip time to get across 2 lousy time zones: 17.5 hours.

If you think about it, the problem was that I let Joel plan the trip to Oakland airport, which means he planned for plenty of time (2.5 hours), and even tried to bake in something going wrong. Regular readers of this blog know what happens when I attempt to arrive at the airport in a responsible, early fashion: unmitigated disaster. This trip was certainly no exception.

So now, I've been up almost 40 hours with just 2 crappy hours of sleep on the flight from San Jose. In the morning we go to the funeral home to make all the arrangements for the service and such. But now, I must pass out. Thus far, my strategy of not processing the actual event is working. We'll see how long I can keep it up.