I'm gonna teach peace to the conquered, gonna tame the proud

Road blog: Dallas - day 1

Well I'm finally getting back to traveling for the job, not that I've been dying to get away from home but I have been dying to get out of the office where I'm not exactly clear on what I do and get back to running shows, where I know what I do and what I'm good at. Feels much better.

Yesterday was spent almost entirely in the airport - I checked my flight status at home and everything was on time, jumped in the van and drove the short distance to the airport only to find out my flight had been delayed by 2+ hours, and of course my ride had already left. So I decided to meander through security and get all that out of the way and just sit and enjoy my book, send a couple emails and not stress about it too much, even when they delayed us even further and then made us change gates.

the only real moment of frustration came when the gate agent at the new gate they had shuffled us to got on the overhead speakers and told everyone that had been waiting there all day like me that, in a few moments the plane we had been waiting for would be pulling up and would be full of very, very late people and would do them a favor and stay out of the way? It reads like a perfectly reasonable plan but it wasn't spoken that way - it came out, and was pretty universally heard, like they had just about had enough of all us that had just been hanging out all day and would we kindly stop loitering and getting in the way of them doing their business...?

because after 4 extra hours in an airport people love being treated like they are the ones inconveniencing the airlines. So the crowd that had been actually pretty mellow was suddenly pissed off, just in time to get on the plane. thanks for that.

flew into Dallas and, just because it figures after all that, didn't have a hotel room. They had no record of me anywhere (but insisted on asking me repeatedly if I was a guy with a similar last name, even though they were holding my drivers license) and the hotel was sold out for the days of my trip. They managed to find me a room for tonight only so I didn't have to get back into a cab (after sitting in Texas rush-hour, having landed at 5 instead of 2) and I was able to get to work.

the work part went great, no problems and no worries. that much I can handle.
Client called when she arrived to tell me she didn't have a reservation either and she'd found out that both of us had been booked in the wrong hotel. At least I have an answer, plus she decided to meet later this morning since she'll have to cab it over here, so I have a couple extra hours to wake up (even though I didn't really sleep much and got out of bed an hour before my wake up call, which still hasn't come - no wonder I get paranoid) and prep to spend the day with a bunch of corporate lawyers.

the show itself is one of the easiest ones I have to run - I ran the same program in Minneapolis on no sleep having almost died in an ice storm so this should be a breeze.