boon's log 3805.04: Cutting it close...

Just got back from Arizona. The flight itself was rather uneventful, except that I almost missed my flight back due to a detour that (I'm kinda glad) I made to HRC Phoenix. They were having some sales going on and I got ourselves some goodies.

Anyway, it was 35 minutes before my flight and I'd only reached the car rental carpark and was returning my car - and I really thought that I was surely going to miss my flight. When I got on the shuttle from the rental car carpark to the terminal, I discovered that there were 3-4 other people in the same shuttle that are on the same flight as I was and all of us were looking at our watches and asking the shuttle driver to speed up. At that moment, it kinda reminded me about an episode from the Amazing Race.

The moment the bus stopped at our terminal and opened the door, we dashed out of the shuttle and started running to the check-in counter.

**about 20minutes left... (the door closes 10minutes before the flight)

The ground crew at the counter went, "Cutting it close, sir. I suggest you do not walk..."

Boarding pass checked and we (again) dashed for the immigration and oh my goodness, I tell you... the things you'd have to do...

- remove laptop and cameras from your bag(s) and put them in a separate bin.
- coins, wallets, keys, cellphones, pagers in a separate bin
- jackets in a separate bin
- shoes in a separate bin
- then there is your bag (depending on how many you have...)

so, one person would have to take care of those items 4-5 bins/buckets and make sure that they go through the x-ray machine before he or she goes through the metal detector...

... then re-collect your stuffs and stuff them back to where they were before the x-ray machine!

**15 minutes to departure

running like a mad man. I've always wondered if the security guys would just stop you and give you a hard time for running in the terminal. (Thank God for travelators). anyways.

Made it to the gate with 2 minutes to spare! and sweating like a pig... boarded the plane and then at that moment, in the plane, the typical/usual thought hit me -

"did I take everything from the x-ray machine?"

Gosh, that is the worst... furthermore the guy behind me had the same model of laptop that I have -

"did we, by any chance, swap notebooks and did not know about it?"

I then double-checked my stuffs (and yes, my laptop too - and made a mental note to put a big sticker on the top of the laptop so that others would not mistakenly swap theirs with mine). Then my mind kind of wandered off to thinking what if the guy behind me at the x-ray machine really did swap PCs with me? How would I contact him and exchange our laptops? Is there anyway IBM is able to detect the user by the serial number - where he attempts to boot-up the PC and contact him. DUH! (Maybe Earth Google can help) Anyways, scary thought, ain't it?

The plane started to taxi out and I decided to brush it off and attempted to finish off the Hunt for Red October...

boon out...