As it turned out, the defense itself was the easy part of the trip to Lubbock.
I had to schedule the defense at least three weeks before I could do it, and I had decided a Monday would be optimal for me. My adviser was amenable to 10 October at 10 a.m., so I set it for 10/10 @ 10. I booked a flight from the airport two miles from my house to the one in Lubbock and set up a rental car for travel around Lubbock. In the interim, I built and tweaked my presentation, and I was pretty well set to go.
The morning of 10/10 dawned a little gray and misty, and I had butterflies in my stomach more because I always worry about missing my flights than about the upcoming presentation. My boomerang son had promised to be ready to take me to the airport for the 1 p.m. flight, but when I learned that he would be missing a friend's wedding in Dallas to do that, I asked him to find me a backup ride and shoved him out the door. He hooked me up with Shrek, who called about an hour early to let me know he remembered, and I calmed down a bit.
During the course of the morning, the rains came down harder, but I concentrated on some grading I needed to do and kept an eye on the weather channel maps. If things happened as projected, the rain would ease up enough in time for my flight, and while the storm was supposed to skirt the west side of the Houston layover, I thought everything would be fine.
We went through security right on schedule (I had only one carry-on bag, but I had stuffed my computer bag and my purse inside it, and something in my stuff had a security person perplexed for longer than it should have), and I parked in the waiting room and popped open my computer to entertain myself for the short wait.
Sooner than I'd have guessed, I learned that it would be longer than expected: the storm had indeed reached the Houston airport, and flights were being delayed there so that our plane wouldn't have a place to land. I settled in with an online Sunday crossword puzzle.
The delay announcements kept coming. After the line at the help station subsided some, I asked what these delays would mean for my flight. The attendant told me my connecting flight had also been delayed, but he also had reserved a spot for me on a later flight, just in case. I went happily back to my corner to wait for the weather to get me on my way.
We finally boarded around 6 p.m. (That's 6 hours in the waiting room in a small airport that has no food available. I don't know why I had packed myself a little baggie of trail mix, but thank goodness I had.) We landed in Houston a little before 7, and I headed toward the gate where my flight was supposed to be—just in time to learn that it had been canceled.
No problem; I had a ticket on a later flight, right? No so much: the gate attendant told me it was a standby ticket, but she could print out a boarding pass for me, and I was "pretty high on the list," so I should go ahead and check in.
I had to haul my bag several gates away to get to the new location, and when I got there I told the attendant I needed to know what the chances were that I might make the flight. He started a song and dance about how this flight would have limited space because it was carrying extra fuel, so it wouldn't have as many stand-by openings as it might otherwise have. I bit my tongue so I wouldn't say, "No shit, Sherlock. You've had delays and cancellations all day long, and the chances that any standbys will get on is probably between slim and none, but why in the hell are you carrying extra fuel when you have an airport of tired, angry customers who need to get somewhere?"
Instead, I said very firmly, "Look, I need to know what my chances are of getting on this flight. I have to get to Lubbock tonight, and if you can't get me there, I have to find another way."
He started another tap dance about how airlines can't ever be sure how many people are going to be at the gate for any flight (like they can't check the check-in records, I assume? Or does the check-in-from-home thing just make that a bigger crapshoot?), but I had a "good" position in the queue.
"What number am I?" I asked.
Then he turned sarcastic and went back through his "I'm not allowed to tell you" routine, then told me it would be my decision about whether to wait to see what my chances were, knowing that if I walked out, I ran the risk of missing an open spot. He said this waving two fingers around, so I thought he might be telling me I was second on the list, which would have been worth at least a shot. In fact, I had already looked around the area enough to decide that I'd wait if I were first or second, leave if I were fourth or more, and flip a coin if I were third. His refusal to tell me anything but then to dare me to gamble was a little like challenging me to Russian roulette with a chamber that might have something between one and six bullets in it. I was furious, but I asked him if I had time to go get something to eat before the flight left.
He walked me over to a nearby food station that had tired sandwiches and salads, hot dogs, and microwavable pizzas and asked the girl to give me his discount on the food. Not what I wanted, but I felt as if he were at least making an attempt to be helpful, and maybe those two fingers meant I was second in line. That, I had decided, would be worth the stay.
The soda machine was broken, but the clerk told me she could give me two bottled drinks instead of the refillable cup I had asked for, so I took her up on it, got a limp salad, and sat down to eat. When the gate attendant call the flight, I hopped up to get my second drink and went to wait for calls for standbys.
By the time I got there, he had called two, and neither of them was me. He looked at me and said curtly, "I'm sorry, but with this extra fuel, that's all we can take."
"Can you help me get on a flight back home?" I asked him.
"No, you'll have to go to the service desk," he told me. "Or wait; I'll be right back."
The service desk had been backed up ever since I got to the airport—the one in that particular little gate pod is the only one in the terminal for that airline—so I first tried going to the terminal where I had landed to see if they could help me. They send me back to the first terminal, but at least the line was down a little. While I waited, I called Boomerang to tell him to gas up my car, grab me a blanket and a pillow, and come to Houston to get me. I could sleep a little while he drove me back home, grab a drink and a snack, and hit the road for Lubbock. I'd be driving all night, but it was a start.
I also called Discover to see if they would be able to help me if the airline got cranky about refunding my ticket, and as the agent assured me they could—but I should check with the airline first—I reached the service desk. I handed the agent my driver's license and reached for my bag to give her my boarding passes when she announced, "You're on a cell phone and I'm not going to deal with that. You can just wait."
I hung up the phone and said, "I'm not on a cell phone now and I'm tired of the way this airline is handling me."
She brushed me aside, but the person next to her was available and started typing my name into her terminal. She was fairly efficient, but the first woman wound up having to help her solve my problem. Once she decided to help, she was pretty efficient, but she could have been a lot nicer about it.
I called Boomerang back to tell him where to pick me up and went down to the baggage dock to see what I was going to have to do about the rest of the trip. I called the hotel to tell them I would be very, very late and I'd need the room for a second night, preferably at state rates, and they assured me that would be done. I called the rental car company to be sure I wouldn't be charged for the car at the Lubbock airport, and then I had a brainstorm: I could rent a car at state rates and drive to Lubbock, probably faster than Boomerang could get me home and routed through central Texas at at less cost to my department and less wear on my car.
The Avis clerk was friendly and efficient, and I had a shiny new Camry to drive north. Darling Daughter had taught me to use the satellite navigation on my cell phone when she was home the last time, and I set it up to help me find the best route. I had a little mist on the way north, but the traffic—even close to midnight—was moving at close to warp speed, and I was happy to spend my time mostly just keeping up. Mostly the trip was boring enough that I could go over the presentation in my head. I figured if I did it the way it ought to be done, it would take at least an hour; my adviser said 20 minutes, max.
Arriving at Dallas on I-45 is a lot different from I-35, where a long string of little burgs lines the highway before the city. I had planned a stop at one of those burgs, but I arrived at I-20 before I knew it, so I took the left and kept rolling. In fact, I rolled through Dallas, Arlington, and Fort Worth before I found a place where I felt comfortable slowing down—a little more than 4 hours of driving without a stop. By some miracle, the sat nav on the phone was still working, but the beeper started telling me my battery was about gone.
I pulled off at the first bright lights after I got out of Fort Worth, made a pit stop, and bought a cheap car charger so I could have the company of my phone to go along with the assortment of radio stations I found; I didn't need the navigation to get to Lubbock, but I was likely to once I hit town, and I liked knowing how much farther I had to travel and sort of what time I could expect to get there. (In-town driving in Lubbock slowed me down, but the sat nav was right within about 15 minutes.)
Highway 20 doesn't have a lot of traffic between midnight at 4 a.m., so that part of the trip went smoothly except for the stretch where Abilene was supposed to be. It was there on my way home, so I guess it was there on my way up, but it was covered with fog like polyfill that made every blotch on the road look scary, but worse than that were the streetlights. When I first approached one in that stuff, I wasn't sure I was still in the same reality: it loomed over the road like a humongous ghost, staring down as if it were looking into my soul. Once I figured out that I was still awake and rolling, I sort of adjusted to the parade of apparitions, but I dreaded the possibility that they might stay with me for the rest of the trip.
The fog lifted on the west of Abilene as unexpectedly as it settled in on the east, and the highway was again friendly and easy to drive. In fact, as I pulled through Sweetwater, I realized that I would miss seeing the wind farms west of Sweetwater and on the road north.
Then I made that turn north, and within a few minutes, I had a much happier surprise: the windmills mostly have big, flashing red lights in the middle, and as I approached, they all winked on like a miles-wide fireworks display. It made sense that they would be lighted to keep airplanes from crashing into them, but I never had thought about how cool that show would be.
I rolled into Lubbock around 5:30 in the morning and checked into the hotel at about 6 a.m.—9 hours after I had turned north on I-45 in Houston. I went to my room, stripped off my jeans, and tumbled into bed, expecting a wake-up call at 8:15. I'm not sure how much sleep I got; I remember having a vision of some sort in which my adviser had dressed my whole committee in "muppet bibs," so that their faces looked out at me over fuzzy puppets that had arms like Bucky Katt in the funny papers and legs like Furbies so the committee members could stick their harms in the "legs" and move the feet around. I have no idea where that came from.
I answered the wake-up call at 8:15, jumped into the tub and into my clothes, grabbed milk from the breakfast area, and met my adviser in the lobby at 8:45. (Thank goodness I keep the hair short!)
We got to his office before he asked if I'd brought the forms that needed to be signed, but we still had time to drive the few blocks back to the hotel and pick them up. Just as well I didn't count on having time to practice.
The department head showed up right at the 10 o'clock start time with the graduate studies representative hot on his heels; the other two committee members dragged in a few minutes later, just like my graduate students do. My adviser dispensed with the formalities and gave me the go signal, and I was off and running.
I dashed through my hour-long presentation as fast as I could, nearly finishing in just under 30 minutes. Not quite finishing; my COPD kicked in, my voice went out, and I ground to a halt. Everyone in the room was sympathetic, waiting patiently while I sucked down most of a bottle of water and popped a cough drop in my mouth. When I regained my composure, I finished the last few words of the talk and asked for questions.
The committee members mostly praised my work and asked me about the next steps I might take in pursuing this line of research, but the graduate rep had another line of questions. I didn't hear but one or two of them before I realized he had come with an agenda: he wasn't nearly as interested in finding out what my research had shown as in convincing me that his approach to engineering writing was The One True Way and trying to get me to admit that some of the things I said engineers had told me they preferred in their papers were just wrong. Eventually he asked me if I had read the paper he wrote 20-odd years ago about how to write an engineering paper, because if I had, I would have known how it should be done. I pointed out that I had read a number of papers of that sort, but they hadn't particularly supported one another; all of them tended to be one writer's opinion—and that was a large part of the reason for my research.
After almost two hours, one of the committee members—who had come in tired and had other work to do—announced that she thought it was time to stop with the questions and get on with the decision making. I smiled and said, "I think she's had enough of this," and she said, "No, I just want to get to the part where we get to call you 'Doc'!" They dismissed me, talked for about a minute (I had warned my adviser that if they carried on too long, he'd have to come wake me up), and called me back in. Over!
My adviser took one of the committee members and me out for lunch and then dropped me back at the hotel. I changed back into jeans and set out to see the Buddy Holly museum because I've never been there. Sat nav helped me find it; it didn't tell me that on Mondays the museum is closed. The irony just never ends.
I went back to the hotel and called Avis to see what would happen to my bill if instead of driving back to Houston, I went home and left the car there. If the charge were small enough, I could save time and frustration by not having to go back to Houston (and I could stop in Dublin for lunch with a friend who lives there); otherwise, I'd have to arrange to get home from Houston. Even though I asked specifically whether the change in drop-off location would add to the cost of the car, two company representatives told me it would not.
The trip home was lovely. I woke up early and got on the road, eased down the highway to Dublin in time to visit a while before lunch, and still got home well before Boomerang was due home from work. I cleaned out the car, grabbed the paperwork I needed, and headed for the airport. Where I was told that a one-way rental would still have the same per-day cost, but it also had a 20-cents/mile additional charge. I thought 20 cents seemed low, but for the 100 miles to Houston, that shouldn't be a problem. "So how much for that?" I asked.
"$200." Turns out they charge 20 cents/mile for every mile of the trip, Houston to Lubbock to home."You can call our office in Houston to see if they can remove that."
I had sat enough over the past three days, so I had decided to walk the couple of miles home from the airport. When I got home, I called Houston and got my charge reduced by half—enough to make the drive straight home really worth the effort.
I slept very well last night.
When I got to the office today, a couple of graduate students in my office happily greeted me with "Hi, doc!"
