Lost Gaijin

Those of you who know me well, know that I have a pretty sweet life. Case in point, I am traveling to Tokyo for a vacation with my sister and her husband and two children.  They have been living in 'Nippon' for two years and will be showing me around. My mother will also be there and my executive airfare from Seattle to Tokyo is courtesy of air miles that my mother collected. Not too shabby.

Now, what has this got to do with writing? I hear you cry. I was going to be using a good portion of this morning to work on my book project. I had the best laid plans, in the very general sense that spare time in lay-overs was to be spent writing.

That was until I woke up at 5:00 am this morning, sat bolt upright in bed and began the dance that only those who have slept through or otherwise managed to screw up setting an alarm know. It is the one legged dance of dressing yourself while calling a cab company with your free hand all the while chanting things to youself like "calm down, calm down, calm down". My first phone call of the morning was to Blue Bird Cabs Victoria and went something like "HiIneedacabtotheairportandIsleptthroughmyalarm."

I had just enough time to put on my shoes, feed my cats and run out the door. I'm not sure I locked the door but I really hope so.

Fortunately, I've been on the side of the paranoid angels for years when it comes to preflight packing and everything was sitting by the door in a tidy little pile. Although, I did realize on the flight to Seattle that I forgot to pack a towel, but I'm getting a head of myself. So I roll into my parking lot with my bag and my backpack just as the cab pulls up. Kudos to Blue Bird Cabs by the way, please give them your business. I run to the cab. The driver steps on it and we're off like a bat out of hell.

Now, I'm a pretty practical person and I can tell you that I knew when I woke up that I had missed the flight without question. But, I also have a fair amount of experience with airports and I know the key attitude to getting to your end destination is never say die. En route, back in the cab, I call into the AirCanada customer service desk to see if there is a 7:00 am flight, because at this point all I can think about is the connecting flight to Tokyo that I'm taking from Seattle. They can't help me but wish me luck.

When you're running for a plane you can get a kind of single-minded stupidness that makes you think that this flight is the most important thing you've ever done in your life and if you don't make it your mom won't love you anymore, and your professional friends will lose all respect for you, and before long you will be in ruin all because you couldn't manage to take a vacation properly. I am familiar with this level of pre-flight excitement and did my best to keep myself calm with deep breaths and visualization of the now popular Old Spice commercials. But the cab driver still felt the need to tell me regularly that everything would be ok.

I jump out of the cab and into the terminal at 5:28, in time to be called ridiculously late by the AirCanada Jazz employee KH. The details of what happened next are not entirely consequential except that the "well-wishing" customer service agent I had spoken to early edited my reservation while I was at the service desk speaking to the attendant by effectively deleting it! This had the effect of locking out AirCanada employee KH so that she could not book me on a later flight. I think that little stunt irked AirCanada employee KH, who instead of continuing the typical AirCanada policy of messing with aeroplan customers took pity on me, gave me a lecture about punctuality and got me out on the next flight to Vancouver. I will be bringing something back for her and welcome suggestions for what is an appropriate gift for the AirCanada employee who just gave a *&^% about someone she didn't have to.

I had another Amazing Race type connection through US Customs (as I now had 1 hour instead of 2.5 to make the gate) but through the grace of a bunch of really helpful people who I may never see again I made it to Seattle and am just three hours from departure to Japan.

The kicker about the whole production was the night before I actually considered a double alarm (cellphone plus alarm clock) but thought "this has never happened to me and I will engage in that degree of over-kill". However, as my favourite script writer would say, "turns out that was just the right amount of kill". I imagine at 4:00pm this afternoon my cats will find themselves rudely awakened from their afternoon nap.

So, I'm going to use this time to write (although I'm eyeing up the complimentary bar and frankly I'm thinking that its 5 o'clock somewhere). I will shoehorn this story into my blog by saying that I think this story illustrates rather usefully that sometimes you have to get another story off your mind before you can focus on writing.