Glamour Girl

I have been a mom for 4 1/2 years working in a work from home job and holding it together pretty well I think. But recently that has all changed. Apparently throwing one little kink in the situation is just what was needed to throw everything off balance.

In January my position was changed drastically and now I am super glamorous and get to travel quite a bit for my job. I gotta tell you it has been beyond challenging to juggle my travel schedule, kids school schedules, etc. In prepping for this trip I took to Houston yesterday I spent so much time and energy organizing getting the kids here and there, packing school bags and planning dinner, that apparently I forgot completely to worry about myself.

This particular trip was one of those fun ones where I flew to Houston for a 1 1/2 hour meeting and flew back. I have made this trip twice since January and in trying to rack up Southwest Airlines credits I have had to spend the night in Houston each time because timing didn't work out to get there and back again the same day. For yesterday's trip I decided to do it all in one day but that meant having to utilize two different airlines. No biggie right?

If you don't count the landing in Houston that was so hard it knocked the wind out of me, all was uneventful and fine with my meeting, etc. Oh and you know what was super fun? When I turned my rental car in, walked into the airport and found out the airline I was flying home was not at the airport I was currently standing in.

Seriously? Houston has two airports? Who knew? What is wrong with me? How did I not know that? Looking back upon this now, I did know that but it never occurred to me to check if that would be an issue for me.

The lovely Airport Customer Service lady told me a shuttle could get me to the other airport in an hour. That is neat and all but my flight was leaving in 1 hour and 13 minutes. The bad thing was that I still wasn't even sure if the other was the airport I needed. I had looked at my itinerary the day before and vaguely remembered seeing something about my flight being operated by Express something or other - not my actual airline.

I went to the Taxi stand and asked him how long it would take to get there. He said he would get me there in 45 minutes. Well what are you standing around for, let's move then! I honestly still didn't know if this other airport was even the right place to be going and so I called Dan. I do these things to him all the time, I throw problems on him that he has absolutely no power to fix. He still talks about the time I called him in a panic while he was on a business trip in LA and told him our dogs had escaped from the back yard. Really, what was he to do?

Yesterday was no different, I called him to see how he could fix it. He is clearly the rational one in this relationship. He told me to hang up and call the airline to figure out where I needed to be. How did he get to be so darn smart?

So I called the airline while my taxi driver was zipping down the highway possibly toward the right airport.

Here is a recap of my call to Continental Airlines:

Automated Machine "Hello, thank you for calling Continental Airlines, please enter or say your Confirmation code or if you don't know, say "I don't know it""

Me: "I don't know it"

Automated Machine: "I'm sorry, I could not understand you, can you please say it again?"

Me: "I don't know it!"

Automated Machine:"I'm sorry, I could not understand you, can you please say it again?"

This goes on for like 5 minutes and I used every variation of that sentence that I could.
"I don't know it"
"I don't know"
"I DO not know"
"I do NOT know"
"I do not KNOW"

Either I surpassed my allotted number of chances or their machine is programmed to recognize profanity but either way I was moved along on to the next menu which told me my wait time for a customer service representative would be 15-20 minutes. Really????

Finally by holding my computer with my left hand wrapped around my head sitting on my knees backward, I was able to get Internet service while we were speeding down the highway. I found my itinerary and realized we were heading in the right direction thankfully!

I chilled a little bit knowing we were at least going to the correct place. Now if I was going to make my flight was a whole other issue. When he could see I was calming a smidge, my cab driver said "How did you do this to yourself?" I started laughing hysterically like a mad woman at that. Stress does weird things to me.

Luckily I didn't have any bags with me other than my work bag since I was there only for the day and so I had nothing to check which would help with timing. Unluckily I didn't have any bags with me other than my work bag since I was there only for the day and so I had nothing to wear if I were to miss my flight.

I probably called Dan like 15 times throughout that cab ride. I later found out he had a friend over that evening and they were working on fixing a guitar. I bet they had some pretty major laughs at my expense.

We got to the airport, I tipped the cab driver like $1,000 and gave him a hug. I got to my gate as they were boarding, huffing and puffing I sat down in my seat, ordered a drink and reflected on how glamorous it is to be a world wide traveler for work.