The adage “if it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all” really fits me this week. After spending most of the week (Tuesday through Friday) down in LA for my new job I managed to really rack up the bad luck points. Here are the highlights:
- The rental car company gave me the wrong directions to my hotel, leading me on a 1 1/2 hour tour of some of the scariest areas of LA
- Once I got to the hotel, I found they allow pets in some of the rooms. While pets should not have been in my room, the elevators have a distinctive wet dog smell
- The walls of the room were paper thin, allowing me to hear both the conversations next door and the bathroom visits from across the hall
- Many of the people I visited with on the trip were seriously sick, as in go to the doctor and stay home with lots of fluid and rest – sick
- On the last day I must have eaten something that didn’t agree with me because I was up all night with stomach pains, I tossed my cookies, got about 1 hour of sleep, then had to get up at 4:30am to catch my flight home
- The flight home from LAX to SJC is supposed to be about 55 minutes long. Mine took about 5 1/2 hours. Fog at SJC made us circle for an hour before diverting to Oakland, where American Airlines had to figure out what to do with a plane full of angry folks
So there you have it. That was my week in a nutshell, or at least the really bad parts. I left out the bad customer service stories because they simply couldn’t measure up to the rest of the trip. Better luck next time, I suppose.