Womack Report

January 5, 2012

Error margin

Filed under: General — Phillip Womack @ 3:52 pm

This has ended up being a very frustrating week.

I had two unusual tasks for the week.  First, I’ve had a ski trip planned for a couple months now, leaving tonight, getting back next Thursday.  Promises to be a good time.  Peter and Erin did most of the organizing.

My plane actually leaves tonight at 5:30.  I took the whole day off, just so that I wouldn’t have to get in a hurry and could spend the day running errands.

Then, I got serious about Harvard thing.  Needed to fit the GMAT test in.  Went looking for test centers to register, and Eureka! there’s an appointment open near me on the 5th, the day I’d already taken off work!  This was about a month ago.  All worked out pretty cleverly.

This makes for a busy day, mind you.  Four hours of testing in the morning, then three hours of airplane travel, then a few more hours of driving from Denver to Steamboat.  Going to be packed, but, hey, nothing I can’t handle.

Monday this week, T minus three days from leaving, I help Dad reshuffle a few things in his garage.  Picking up a sheet of plywood, my right wrist make this little twang sensation.  Whoops.  Trick wrist acting up again!  Stupidly, I then went shooting with Mom, since she has a new gun, and that aggravated it.  Then, since it still felt fine, I mowed my lawn.  That probably didn’t help.  By the evening, the wrist hurt a lot.  Only when I moved it, granted.  Fortunately, you don’t use your wrist at all working an IT job, or taking a computer-based test, or skiing!  I’ve purchased a wrist brace now.

Then, we got a sudden call that Grandpa was in the hospital.  He had an infection in his elbow that looked scary.  So, went to visit him.  He’s fine; any medical issue is alarming when you’re dealing with an 80-year-old who’s had multiple heart attacks, but they put him on an antibiotic IV, and he responded just fine.

Tuesday was not too bad.  Some issues at work; boss’s laptop is being weird, but I’ve got it fixed.  Wrist was bothering me, but the brace helped enormously, and it improved hugely overnight.  Spend a few hours that night working remotely to update servers and make sure everything’s OK, since I’m going to be out of town for almost a week.

Wednesday is going to be a day for packing and working on the last bits of my application.  Easy living.  Except, right at 4:15 or so, I get a call.  It’s the GMAT testing center.  A transformer blew up, and they can’t administer the test Thursday.  When would I like to reschedule?

This is a problem, of course, since I have a deadline to take that test of January 10 for Harvard’s admissions, and I’ll be flying out to the mountains from the 5th to 10th.  No other testing center in Houston has anything available the 5th.  Some digging produces a center in Austin that has an available slot, and my flight to Denver stops in Austin!  Score!  I reshuffle flights to meet the plane in Austin, and call the testing people to get on the schedule. 

Sorry, in the ten minutes since you last looked, that appointment was taken.

There’s another appointment available, in Beaumont, at 9:00 AM.  Beaumont, Texas is not remotely near either the place I was at, or the place I wanted to be.  But it’s only a two-hour drive from Houston.  Hour and a half with a tail wind.  So, grab that slot.  Call Southwest Airlines again, have them switch my flights back to the original configuration.

So, now I need to do everything I already had planned for Thursday, but with an extra four hours of round-trip driving.  Hooray.  So much for my padding, and my leisurely day for packing.  I instead spend Wednesday night getting everything together so that I can hit the ground running, borrow a few things I need for the trip, and get five hours of sleep.

There are two particularly irritating things about this.  First, I left plenty of error margin in my initial plans for things to go wrong.  I thought this out.  And it worked.  I sit here, in a Fuddrucker’s, half an hour from my airport, with three hours until my plane takes off.  I had to run like a hamster for a while, but it’s looking like things may, in fact, go off without a hitch.  Which is great, but vaguely unsatisfying.  Doesn’t make for a very entertaining story.  “Yeah, all this stuff went wrong.  I was prepared for it, so everything was fine.”  Lacks punch, it does.

The second irritating thing is that I don’t have anyone to blame for all this.  The Pearson testing center people would be very satisfying scapegoats, since it’s their inability to give me the test I booked well in advance that caused the most trouble.  Except, well, a power transformer blew up.  They probably didn’t cause that.  And they went out of their way on my behalf; they could have allowed me to just show up at the testing site that was having problems and be out of luck, but instead they called me up and helped me reschedule.  I’ll admit to being mad at them, but it was irrational.  And the people at Southwest who helped me reschedule my flight…twice…were nothing but polite and helpful, and made that whole process easy, even when it seemed evident from my side of the phone conversation that their system was being squirrely.  I can’t even blame myself, because, hey, I’m pretty awesome, jumped on this issue and surfed it to a solution.  Even my wrist is back to about 90% function; I’m still being cautious, but it doesn’t hurt in normal use.

So there’s no funny story and no useful indignation.  Just fault-tolerant planning and good customer service.  Which isn’t all that entertaining for anyone.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress