28/01/05 - Day In The Life
Phone rings. That is my morning alarm. I have set my mobile phone to play a not too annoying ring tone at 6am every weekday. It starts as a distant grove and the phone jumps about with it’s internal vibrate. On good mornings I have it close at hand and it can be reached and snoozed without major trauma. On bad mornings it is in another room and demands that I get out of bed altogether immediately spoiling my mood.
Today started as a good morning. I had had a solid six hours of sleep, so I was fully awake with just one snooze cycle. Because we are travelling to the gold coast today there are a few extra things to be done. Mainly packing.
After a bit of coffee and water the day is started. I find myself ready for work a bit earlier than expected. Just as I make to leave the heavens open up and the air is thick with water. This sets me back to my normal ‘just in time pace’ as the rain eases after only 10minutes of serious dumping. The threat of another downpour results in the additional baggage of an umbrella, which naturally became unnecessary once I had left the house.
A quick bus trip and a walk up ‘The Plaza’ to work. This brings me to a little pet hate of mine. ‘The Plaza’. In the US, NBC’s Today show broadcasts from the Rockefeller Centre in New York. Most mornings the show personalities step outside and meet with the crowd in Rockefeller Plaza. Since this is actually the name of the place calling it the Plaza makes perfect sense.
Unfortunately the same logic does not apply to the Channel 7 Sunrise show, now located at the top of Martin Place in Sydney. The Sunrise team, however, insist on calling their bit of Martin Place ‘The Plaza’ as they do their best to rip off the format of the US show. This probably wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t have to walk past and through it every morning.
Once at work I settled into a surprisingly productive morning finishing a customer activity model and then getting into writing p some project opinions and conclusions. At some point, I have decided, I have to stick my neck out and write these down. I need to release my opinions to paper and share them. There is no point just talking about them.
As I was thinking about what to write I had a chat with one of the other staff who (I think) is more supportive of my ideas than I had first thought. This spurred me on to get some good stuff out of my head.
Day over. Rush home to finish getting ready to go to the Gold Coast. Everything packed. Go. I have decided to drive in and use the long term parking, so sorting out the transport for that part of the trip is easy. I thought that the Long Term Car park (the LTC as it is known to the locals) was near the normal car park. Not a chance. You can’t even see the airport from where I finally parked.
This was beginning to make me worried about time. I was stuck a good 20 to 30 minutes walk (actually even that might be optimistic) away from the airport with only 35 minutes till the flight was due to board. I found a bus stop labelled ‘Stop B’ and waited, hoping that these shuttle busses would be more frequent under pressure than might normally be the case. A few anxious minutes later two Japanese chaps turned up, dumped their stereotypical golf clubs and luggage at the buss stop then commenced (even more stereotypically) taking photos of the sprawl of the LTC.
They were startled out of their photographic bliss by the final arrival of the shuttle bus. I was feeling a little more comfortable now that I was on the move again, but knew that I was running very low on time. After a bit of misdirected wandering from one terminal to the next I found the check in for my flight. This was on of the new digital self-service kiosks with the groovy touch screens. There was a problem though. The time on the screens did not match the time on my itinerary, stating instead that the plane would be leaving exactly an hour later than originally stated. With my newly minted boarding pass in hand I checked with the human check in who confirmed the yes the flight was delayed due to some busted widget somewhere so they had to source another plane.
The hour ended up stretching in to nearly two before we finally boarded. This is the reason that I have had the opportunity to get all of this on paper tonight.
…..
The plane in now descending. Apparently Hewitt defeated Roddick in the tennis while we waited in the Sydney terminal. I am now just hoping that the hire car guys hasn’t gone home’..
Friday, January 28th, 2005
