SD Best Practices: Day -1

Note: I’m going to try to do a series of daily recaps about my trip to the SD Best Practices conference in Boston.

First things first, I really don’t care to fly. It isn’t that I’m afraid of heights or anything like that, I just find the whole ordeal uncomfortable. Waiting in airports, waiting on airplanes, sitting on airplane seats, the whole thing I’d just as soon avoid.

Of course driving for hours and hours bores me to tears so flying becomes the lesser of two evils. Comfort aside, at least you get to where you are going fast.

Anyhow, because the first day of conference is Tuesday, and the sessions start bright and early at 8:30am, I flew in on Monday. It was this flight that allowed me to experience something that has never happened to me before on a commercial airline:

My flight got in 25 minutes EARLY.

Apparently I wasn’t the only person shocked by this since the grounds crew was nowhere to be found when we pulled to the gate. The captain had to get on the intercom to explain that we’d thrown them for a loop with our super promptness.

I can just imagine the conversation now.

Control tower (calling grounds crew): “Flight 6343 has just arrived at gate A12 twenty five minutes early. They are requesting baggage unload.”

Grounds Crew: “Uhh, tower, did you say early.”

Control Tower: “That’s an affirmative, we repeat they got in early, copy.”

Grounds Crew: *Silence*

Control Tower: “Copy that grounds crew.”

Grounds Crew: “Right, uh, tower we’re talking this over down here, what does the word ‘early’ actually mean? None of us have heard it before here.”

After finally being allowed off of the plane all that was left was the typical white-knuckle taxi drive through the Williams tunnel to the relative safety of the hotel. More updates coming once the show actually begins.