I made it out to Vegas last night for three days of IBM’s Partnerworld convention, despite more ongoing travel issues. With clear weather reported in Portland and Newark – my connecting city – I thought I had a chance for an uneventful flight, but alas, it was not to be. While sitting on the tarmac, I heard the two words that strike fear into the heart of every business traveller: “ground stop.” Those words are always problematic when you’ve got only a 45 minute layover between connections.
They were even more disturbing for me, however, because of my past history with the airport referred to as EWK. In 98/99, I was a systems integrator working out of NJ/NY, and happened to get staffed on a project in Richmond, VA. Richmond itself was a fine city, not a bad place to be, but the nature of the travel – two weeks down, one weekend back, was not ideal for me and my girlfriend at the time (though, to her credit, she was great about it). But because I was only home for brief periods, I really needed those flights to work, and unfortunately, Newark became the bane of my existence. Things were so bad that during the period I was travelling down there, the Times wrote a story about the congested skies, and used Newark as a case study of the problem: apparently on one very clear Friday afternoon, Newark cancelled or delayed for more than an hour nearly 300 flights (mine among them). So it was that pretty much every week I’d climb in some puddle jumper down at the small Richmond airport, only to be held on the tarmac for hours – in an unairconditioned aircraft – b/c of a “ground stop” at Newark.
So needless to say, ground stop is not really what I wanted to hear last night. But net net, despite the artificial traffic volume created at Newark by most of the airlines pulling their aircraft out of the airport ahead of today’s anticipated storm, I made it safe and sound to the Mandalay Bay, my home away from home for the next three days. And despite the fact that I can think of perhaps no single location more alien to my personality than Vegas, I am looking forward to seeing what IBM’s partners have to say. More on that later.
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