Today I had a stressful time at the airport.

It all started with an e-mail from my manager that it was urgent to call him. I was in a noisy shuttle between the parking lot and the airport so waited until I got to the terminal to call him.

When I entered the airport I heard my name being called over the intercom. Please go to the nearest courtesy phone……

I decided to just call my manager first and found out that I needed to help someone gather some information from one of our databases. I asked if it could wait for 15 minutes since I wanted to get checked in and through security. He said that it was fine as it was not too urgent, he just wanted to make sure he caught me before I got on the plane.

I then got checked in and headed to security. I of course made sure that my pockets were empty. I took off my shoes, belt and coat and placed them all in the buckets. I also removed my laptop and i-Pad. After going through the scan I waited for my bags and saw that they were off to the side.

I then had to wait as several bags were before mine and then watched both carefully packed bags get totally emptied while the agent complained about how much stuff I had in my bags.

Most of you know that I fly quite a bit and my bags were not packed any different today than they usually are. I was not very happy as I knew that someone was waiting for me to help them and also I had not called on the courtesy phone and my name kept getting announced. Just a bit stressful.

Then I noticed something, both the person checking the x-ray scans and the person checking the bags both had name tags on with a start date of only a few months ago. I guess that was why so many bags were being checked at the station.

Finally, I made it to where I could get my computer started up and was able to help get the data that was needed.

It was a good thing that I made it to the airport an hour earlier than usual.

Now for a bit of lunch as I let the stress drain away before the long flight.

Steven