Friday, November 17, 2006

In Boston for a Tea Party

It's a lie. I'm in Westborough (30+ miles outside of Boston) for a conference, but I wanted to use the Fiedler album cover to illustrate. Haven't even had any tea yet, Boston or Westborough.

Picture it: LaGuardia Airport, 9am. Me, early for the 10am US Airways shuttle to Boston. Long, long line. Why? All the electronic kiosks are down. Oh. And all the electronic-anythings for US Airways are down, too. Now, seems to me, the way to handle this would be to call out everyone booked on the 10am flight, hand-write their boarding passes and let them make the flight.

Sorry. Too logical. Damn my common sense! No, they let everyone - folks booked on 11am, 12pm, 1pm - just snake through the same line. Took an average of 8-10 minutes per person to handwrite the passes, etc., and check bags. Roughly half of the 10am passengers missed the flight. So, I'm guessin' that flight went out half empty. That can't be good.

Anyway, made it through for the 11am flight. (Please, please US Airways - don't buy Delta!)

I'm not even going to talk about the $100 cabfare from Logan to Westborough Doubletree. We were told ahead of time that the cost would be around $45. Maybe we were assuming dollars. Possibly they were talking about pound-sterling.

Well, que sera. I must go perk up now, since I'm giving a workshop it a bit. And it's a perky workshop, if you know what I mean, so I need to up my perk-factor pretty darn soon.

If only I could find a cuppa tea . . .

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

After all that you could probably do with something a bit more bolstering than tea. Maybe a snort or two of Lynchburg Tea: Black Jack?

Peter (the other) said...

When I was a wee lad, circa 11-12 years of age, I worked, in a very informal way (I hung around looking to pick up odd bits of jobs), at the local garage in Brookline where Mr. Fiedler used to park his car. On several occasions I was given the job of washing this car.

The call, on whether to take a cab or hire a car, is always dicey, but my rule of thumb is in the city, cab and otherwise... Particularly now that google maps (or variations of such) allow one to print out maps if you don't carry a GPS.

MaryB said...

Winston - finally got tea (but no bourbon. sigh)

PtO - yeah. Got ripped off big-time, though in my defense, we did check with both the hotel and online re: taxi charges from airport. One said $40, one said $36. Caught the hotel-hopper van going back to Logan. (THAT was $36.)