Portland Airport. Gate C16

Boarding for the Flight to Chicago

This morning, addressing a postcard to my nieces, I absentmindedly wrote the date as 5-13-01.

The waiting lounge here is crowded. The flight to Chicago is delayed an hour because of a fire in a  control tower at an airport there, from what I can tell.

It caused a routine evacuation there. All is well, supposedly, but the flights in and out of O'Hare were canceled for two hours, causing a huge backlog across the country.

Our flight is to nearby Midway, which was affected as well. The woman here at the Southwest gate announced that they are finally letting in flights there again, and we will be taking off in about an hour---just fifty five minutes later.

A young Indian-American next to me in the waiting lounge explains all this over the phone to someone in Chicago. He was supposed to fly to O'Hare on United, but his flight was canceled, and now he is trying to get on the Southwest flight, as a stand-by passenger. He had to shell out the difference. United is refunding only half price, since the delay was not their fault.

The flight will be full, if and when it gets off the ground. With my boarding pass in hand---and a low boarding number, I feel quite snug and secure for the time being. But I haven't even left Portland yet.

This morning was a full corporate workday, crammed into a couple hours. There was a problem on the server. Users couldn't access the system. It took an impromptu Skype conference that melded right into a pre-arranged conference call, augmented by many emails. I felt like I was back in New York, in the thick of corporate workplace just like the old days.

Turns out that the database arbiter was down, and had to be rebooted. That's not my job anymore, to do that. Some things change for good.