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Travel Tomorrow

[Saturday’s run: 5 miles; today: 3.4 miles]

With some mild trepidation I start on my journey tomorrow. All flights out of our regional airport go through Atlanta. And outbound flying usually goes pretty smoothly.

It’s the coming back that tends to go wrong. Last fall I was coming back from Denver and we were delayed coming into Atlanta. I missed my connection. And there were people stacked up for the last flight of the day. Eventually I got them to send me to Birmingham and from there I drove home. I have had the return trip go amiss at least three times that I can think of off the top of my head. The most tragic was the time we were late leaving Atlanta, arrived over GTR… but we didn’t land, we turned around and went back to Atlanta. They made some sort of announcement that they couldn’t raise anybody on the radio to turn on the lights, or something like that. It was sad.

But, never fear! I don’t attempt the return until Thursday.


I’m afraid I was a bit querulous toward my boss last week.

We don’t usually go to trade shows. Last year they let us go to one each. I went in April and co-worker went in October. This year he was going to do the spring event and I the fall. But his spring pre-travel expense form was denied in an email.

It wasn’t the boss’s fault. The powers-that-be decided that the money previously approved in the budget for travel/training was not to be spent pending an examination of when the project is shutting down. Which to me says they have not yet given any consideration to what happens to the employees (one being me) when the end comes. Both of us employees could stand to have the networking and the little bit of training update that an industry convention would supply.

A few months ago I spoke to my father-in-law about his experience in the shutdown and lights-off of a manufacturing plant he worked for. His experience was that they offered selected people some remuneration for sticking around and getting things sewed up.

Not only is that not happening in my case, there really isn’t any one who has the authority to make such an offer.


3 replies on “Travel Tomorrow”

Still beats driving, I suspect.

Something like that is why I missed Ludeema’s funeral. Weather and a plane with locked brakes blocking the runway and closing my intended destination airport.

Nice to see the word querulous used in a sentence in real life. (Also, trepidation!)

We have a word of the day at work posted on a white board in the main office. We just use a website that presents a daily word with a definition. Sometimes their definitions aren’t spot-on, like the person in charge of the word is really reaching but not quite grasping.

We acknowledge anyone who uses the word in a sentence without turning themselves into a pretzel to do it.

FWIW I do the accounting for severance where I work. I backed into it when on a merger-related project 10 years ago and it became a process and I’m still doing it. Maybe as it’s highly sensitive. (I do forecasts of stock expense for similar sensitivity issues. I know what everyone makes.) We call it “displacement” which to me is a misnomer as nothing is displacing anything, rather, a position is being closed. Sometimes a person signs an agreement to leave without causing a fuss, gets their “package” but the work continues on a bit – so they might get a retention bonus. Or maybe they agree to turn the lights off or train people in India or Philippines to do their job. Regardless, there are a lot of regulations and legal concerns that I have a sense of but no real knowledge. For a smaller company (vs. 270,000), I wonder if they need outside consultants for this?

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