The third installment of “Stories From the Road” takes us to San Juan, Puerto Rico in the spring of 2005. I had been working off and on in Puerto Rico for 4 or 5 months performing a systems integration project (i.e., a shit-load of hasslework for those non-geeks out there). The project team was predominately staying at the wonderful Radisson hotel in the Condado section of San Juan. Condado was predominantly known as a touristy strip of hotels, restaurants, and bars situated along the beach just east of Old San Juan. The hotel actually wasn’t horrible, it was just showing it’s wrinkles, but the fucker had a casino in the lobby, not good for those of us that are sleep deprived and are also known to gamble from time to time. By the way, driving in San Juan is a full-contact sport. I actually enjoyed it a bit too much and took to merging too fast without looking and laying on the horn like a fish to water. Overall San Juan was a pretty cool town, a bit too touristy, but what do you expect?
We had some challenges “going live” with the new system and I had ended up working somewhere around 30 or 35 hours in a row just prior to my flight home. The way the timing worked out I checked out of my hotel a day early and headed straight to the airport after my marathon work session for an 8 am flight. I had been a road warrior at this point in my career and had racked up considerable frequent flier miles and a gold medallion status on Delta, because of this I often was able to upgrade my seats to first class, which rules when you are totally spent from burning the candle at both ends and blow-torching the middle.
So I get to the airport a total wreck, I’d been up for a couple of days, shaking from the lack of sleep and all of the caffeine (Mt. Dew, the only way to roll), and smelled like horse-shit. The good news, I got the upgrade to first-class, at least I was going to be able to pass out as soon as I boarded the plane. At this point, there was some buzz in the terminal about Cheryl Crow as she had just finished up a concert in San Juan the previous night, and rumor was she was going to be on this plane. I could care less, all I thought about was sweet sweet sleep in my comfy seat, please god just starting boarding.
The call finally comes and we’re boarding, I’m in the first row middle section, the configuration on this plane (I think it was an MD-88) was 2 seats - aisle - 2 seats in the middle - aisle - 2 seats at the opposite window. I get settled in and prepared to crash when all of a sudden Cheryl Crow plops down in the seat next to me. My first thought: “Shit, I totally stink”. One thing you should know about me, I really don’t get star struck at all. This was no different, I don’t think I even looked at her let alone talk to her, I just buckled my seat belt leaned back and crashed hard. In fact I’m pretty sure I snored like a drunken sailor the whole flight back to Atlanta. My only thought was that Lance Armstrong was going to make a comment on sports-center about some stinking, loud, snoring, asshole that sat next to his old-lady on her nightmare flight back to the states from Puerto Rico. Good times…
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