Catastrophes

Planes and buildings went awry during my Chicago-Boston-Chicago trip. I was supposed to fly Southwest to Chicago Midway (scene of various past misadventures), then AirTran Airways to Boston, then stay with Jeni, at the Boston Park Plaza, and at the Boston Sheraton while visiting friends and participating in the American Sociological Association and Association for the Sociology of Religion meetings, then fly AirTran back to Chicago for the Cooperative Congregational Studies Partnership meeting (and stay at the Springhill Suites near O’Hare), then on Southwest back to Louisville.

My first leg – Louisville via Chicago to Boston – was complicated because I got two totally separate tickets (there were no cheap triangle flights – I was partly trying to save my employer money, which boomeranged against me somewhat). Plus I forgot that I would actually have to go outside of security in Midway to pick up my bag (and I didn’t realize that Midway had multiple concourses). My flight left and arrived almost an hour late. Had I been willing to abandon my bag, I might have made the connecting flight. But I went out, found out this was the last flight to Boston and arranged to fly the next morning, picked up my bag, and – after agonizing about whether to spend the night in the airport (I’ve done this before at Midway – but probably before 9/11) – took a free shuttle to the Oaks Motel (way out from Midway - where I got a “distressed passenger” discount). Southwest wouldn’t help me out – partly because of the convoluted reasons they gave for the delays – weather delaying the flying of a (replacement?) part for the plane in Orlando, slow passenger loading in Orlando or Louisville – plus my missed connection was not officially connected to the Southwest flight at all. So I coughed up the money for the hotel and dinner (and stayed up too late blogging) – and missed visiting with Penny’s college friend Jeni and her new baby Jaden Tuesday night and Wednesday morning (because I wasn’t yet in Boston).

In the morning for reasons I forget the AirTran flight was actually late too. I expected that I’d go to Jeni’s apartment, speak Spanish with her nanny Mercedes, and then head off for a late lunch with my friend Linda. But with the late plane, it was not a tough call – I went straight to Massachusetts General Hospital’s Cancer Resource Room.

Five days later I got up at 4 a.m. at the Sheraton to catch the morning AirTran flight back to Chicago Midway. The CCSP steering committee was to start at 8:30 a.m. at the Lutheran Center near O’Hare. I made it on the “T” to Logan Airport at 6 a.m. My flight took off as scheduled. But weather problems in Chicago kept us circling Chicago until eventually – this has never happened to me – we landed in Bloomington, IL, so we would not run out of gas. After an hour on the runway (I wondered if passengers had actually been heading ultimately to Bloomington if they would have let us off – they even tried to keep us in our seatbelts, so that we could take off whenever we were cleared for landing at Midway). (See the penultimate section of “En route” for what happened next.)

But the catastrophes weren’t over. Monday night I was planning to walk from the Lutheran Center back to the hotel. But the clouds looked bad, and what began as I rode back in a car was a torrential rainstorm that sent lightning and even tornadoes all over Chicagoland. While I watched TV and tried blogging in my hotel room, the rain came down in buckets outside and on TV I watched Wrigley Stadium, where a Cubs game had been underway, get evacuated.

The next morning there were tree limbs sprinkled around near where we were. But the drama wasn’t over. Wednesday morning (after I’d had dinner with a Jewish representative and three B’ahai reps) one of the other meeting people and I walked with our brief cases and luggage from the hotel to the Lutheran Center. When we got to the Lutheran Center ground floor/lobby, there was a mass of people in the lobby. Apparently the power had been off for a while (it had gotten kind of warm in there). Dan, a research staff person who helps arrange things while we’re there, showed up in a few minutes. He had arrived at the Center and had taken the elevator up to work on the 9th floor (we were meeting on the 11th floor. A while after the power went off, he walked down eight flights of stairs to join us.) We huddled in the chapel until eventually the Lutherans and the Christian Reformed minister who serves as CCSP secretary arranged a meeting room for us in the adjoining Marriott (where we had stayed until two years ago). They even let us have our catered lunch delivered there. (They don’t usually allow outside food.) There was no Wi Fi there, and so – unlike in the Lutheran Center top floor – we probably all listened and participated more intently since – except for a few people with Wireless cards (Friday I called to find out about these: $40 for a router for wireless in the house; $60 a month –basically like an extra cell phone – for wireless card service – if you sign up for a two-year contract, the card itself is free) – we couldn’t check our e-mail or surf the Internet. Although we wasted some time, the whole experience helped us bond and woke us up a little bit – and got me marginally closer to the “L” station, which turned out to be critical.

Eventually Wednesday everyone who works at the Lutheran Center headed home and, late Wednesday afternoon, the building was still closed. (It was a little like an impromptu version of the implosion day off at the Presbyterian Center last month.) My favorite theory was that – whatever the reason for the power outage – the utility company was not able to get to it because of the hundreds and lightning- and wind-caused problems they were still working on from two nights before.

I had a 5:55 p.m. flight out of Midway and – unlike the way there when there was no time, I planned to take not a cab or a shuttle but my usual route from Midway to this meeting: two “L” stops (the Cumberland stop is not too far from the Marriott). But I stayed at the meeting until the bitter end, and then found it was 4:10 p.m. Chicago-ans still there wondered if I had enough time (and I opted not to revert to taking a cab for a variety of reasons – most importantly, because with rush-hour traffic – it might not be faster. Because I had a heavy bag and I saw others doing it – I did something I don’t usually do – I took elevators. I made it to an in-bound train, then took two elevators up to the Midway-bound orange-bound train. Even though it was already 4:55 p.m. already, in downtown Chicago (where Vincent and I had once gotten off the train) I thought at this point about how – if I’d had more time – I could have gotten out and stopped by Senator Obama’s national headquarters in Chicago (and the moved national Democratic Party headquarters) (the evening I dined with the Jewish and B’ahai reps would have been a time I might have tried to visit my former dissertation committee chair, Louise Tilly, in Evanston).

I grew somewhat pessimistic as my connecting “L” train drew towards the end-of-the-line Midway stop at almost 5:25 p.m. (just 30 minutes before my flight was to leave). The “L” stop is pretty far from the terminal (though they’ve recently renovated some of the passageways). I got to a long Southwest line at about 5:30 p.m. (I actually thought they wouldn’t even let me check in – all the more so with luggage to check – with less than 30 minutes to go). But a Southwest staffer suggested I go outside where cars were dropping people, to “sky cab,” and tip them. They checked me in but made no promises about getting my luggage on the plane, as it was 5:35 p.m. when I went back into the terminal. The security wasn’t very fast, but I managed to get to the gate – running from security (thankfully, it was a close gate) a little after 5:45 p.m. I was the next to the last person on the plane but I made it (Southwest usually cuts it close – this hurt me on my initial leg, but here – when the AirTran flight Monday had actually pulled after from the gate – I profited from this). The flight to Louisville was a quick hour. When I got to baggage claim, Stephanie was there, but not my luggage, which got there late that night (Wednesday) and I picked up Thursday AM on the way to work late.

This was a catastrophe narrowly averted (although – since there was another flight – which I didn’t know at the time – I probably would have simply arrived in Louisville around midnight, instead of at 8 p.m.)

A somewhat stressful string of events, complete with airline foul-ups my fault and not.

P.S. The biggest catastrophe that probably faced us this past two weeks had nothing to do with flying or even my trip. Stephanie stopped by her classroom late in July, in connection with her working a couple of days helping out with new English as a new Language student registration at the school district office. Before the school year ended, Stephanie had gone to her school staff, the district ENL staff, and the district Information Technology staff to try to make sure that no one messed with her computer. Sure enough when she stopped by there last month someone had erased everything on her hard-drive: thousands of documents (including the only electronic copy of our Guatemala book) that she mostly has no duplicates of (at least not electronic), including several years of lesson plans (some of these she has hard copies of), student records transformed into Excel charts and graphs (the district office has most of the actual scores), the only electronic copy of the very cute Guatemala book Stephanie made), and probably hundreds of school and district documents that Stephanie’s colleagues had translated into Spanish. So, now, when Stephanie goes back to school Monday and students arrive on Wednesday, she’ll have to start from scratch at least electronically with making lesson plans. Also, apparently the district ENL staff will have to pay translators to translate all of those documents again. This reminds me of the challenge that still faces my office from back in Wednesday, when hundreds and hundreds of files of data, and programming, that we only had copies of some of, disappeared when my colleague Ida’s computer’s hard drive crashed, the IT staff having recently changed the back-up rules so that it did not back up any of her stuff. Both of these were catastrophes of epic proportions.

-- Perry