There’s a clip from The Onion I like to share whenever the algorithms pop it back up:
I understand this now. The plan I’ve had in place for a couple of months now was that we’d spend our last night in California at the Grand Hyatt at SFO. It’s a nice, brand new, modern hotel, with runway views from some of the rooms, and it’s also on the airtrain line so it’s easy to just hop on the train and you’re only three stops away from your terminal.
That plan failed miserably. We were late leaving the hotel room, and we didn’t allow for the twenty minutes it would take to go a quarter mile on the airtrain since they’re only running one loop and… we missed the bag check deadline for our flight. We couldn’t go. I had even popped for business class since it’s one-way and COVID pricing.
I mentally short-circuited at that point. Not only was it my biggest fuck-up in ~20 years of “flying professionally”, but we really really needed to be in Raleigh by that evening (to meet the car guys), so it really really mattered. I was literally nauseous. American rebooked us and we made it to Raleigh only 3 hours later than expected, but I’ve been mainlining stress and adrenaline for days now and it’s taking a toll. Seriously: I think I’ve flown a few hundred times and today was the biggest mistake. One for the books.
We’re now checked in to a Homewood Suites in Cary, NC. I met up with the car movers and did the exchange a short walk away. I described the auto moving process as being very “wet” to Sherri. To me, a “dry” process would be: we’ll pick up the cars between 12-3pm on June 7 at <address> and deliver them between 4-8pm on June 10 at <address>, with full tracking, and everything confirmed to your credit card.
In practice, with these movers, it ended up being a multi-day window for pick-up, with a strong desire on their part to deliver the cars to me in North Carolina before I’d even be there. The drivers’ English wasn’t great, yet we still had to agree via cell phone on where the “exchange” would happen (cars for cash)… and yes, I had to have $2,000 in cash on me to pay out the balance. It felt “wet” to me. To their credit, the cars arrived in good shape and very quickly (pretty much as quickly as you can drive from CA to NC).