Do you want to know how my day went? Really? No, you probably don’t. But if you keep reading, you’ll find out so, look away.
Last night was a lot of fun. I got to spend time with a distant friend that I haven’t seen in seventeen years. Jose and I fell back in like we had seen each other last week. Talking a little about old times but mostly filling in the details of the last two decades. It looks like I will be here over the weekend so we plan on hanging out a lot this week.
Tonight I just crashed here at the hotel and now you’ll get the review of the day and hear for yourself why I just needed a drink and a bed.
I got up this morning optimistic about the job. I have been waiting in a hot parking lot waiting for my equipment to arrive for the last two days. It finally cleared the tax office yesterday afternoon but the delivery driver couldn’t be there until 5:30 and the local FAA tech wouldn’t be here. So, we set it up for 8am this morning. I woke up feeling real good about today and ready to get some work done.
I get the call on the way to the site that it is pouring down rain but the driver is on the way but he might be a little late. Cool, I’m ready for that, no problem, at least the equipment is on the road. Let me fill you in real quick about how we are getting this equipment delivered. When I tell you, don’t laugh at me, just remember that this is the FAA, your federal tax dollars at work.
I am sitting at airport A. We will be installing the equipment at airport B, ten miles away through the heart of San Juan. When the equipment arrives at airport A, the FAA will pick it up and transport it to airport B.
I get the call at 8:30. The delivery driver is sitting at airport B. I figure, “Right on, saves us a step, we’ll be right over!” Nope. I call it in and they tell me that the FAA INSISTS on making the delivery themselves. I tell the delivery company to bring the equipment over to airport A. As I am trying to describe where I am on the airport property to the dispatcher and her driver, I hear words pass between them that I am pretty sure are “el stupido”. When I finally tell her where I am, she tells me that I am roughly 150 feet from her office. That is where they started out this morning. Ugh! Oh well, we have to follow orders.
So I call the local FAA tech to tell him that the delivery will be here in 20 to 30 minutes. He says that he will dispatch his tech with the truck, they are over at airport B!
The equipment arrives, the FAA tech is nowhere to be found and it is raining. Not a nice pleasant rain. A hard Puerto Rican rain that will drown you in seconds and humidity that will ruin a digital camera just from being brought out from a cold hotel room into the muggy humidity after this rain. Yeah, my camera is totally screwed. So we commandeer a maintenance bay to keep the equipment out of the rain. An hour later the FAA tech shows up with an F150 and no straps. The equipment is as big as a refrigerator and we can not lie it down on its side. No straps and the roads are constructed entirely of pot-holes.
We finally get the equipment tied down and somehow transported over to airport B. We unload it and the tech says that he has to leave and the other tech that will provide our access will be in tomorrow. So we are done for the day.
I call my guys and let them know what is going on and they say we just have to roll with it and that we are done for the day.
Tony and I decide that since it is only noon, it would be a great time to drive out to see the Arecibo observatory because we can be there by 1:30, maybe 2pm. We get on the road and right at 1:30, less than a mile from the damn observatory, we get a call from the boss of bosses. There is a problem at airport A and we need to go over there. I explain to him that we are on the other side of the island and he says we just need to get there as soon as we can.
We drive all the way back and fix the problem. It was a frogged cable (Transmit and Receive were reversed). That’s right, for those of you following along on the home game, it was a physical cable issue, which MEANS; this was not a live service “priority” outage. There was no reason to call us back out for this case. I was less than a mile from the goddamn place and now I’ll probably never get back over there!!! I guess it’s all for the best, my camera is all screwed up and I wouldn’t have gotten that picture I wanted anyway.
We got back to the hotel just in time to sit in on a hour and a half conference call about the proper time entry system and numbers. I listened for ninety minutes as a lot of the techs in the field were whining about having to do their jobs. I mostly bitch when I CAN’T do my job. These guys are complaining because someone asked them to name their files a certain way.
After the call I got Tony and we went over to the hotel bar/restaurant. I ate the fist thing closely resembling “American” food since I got here and it was a Cuban sandwich. It wasn’t toasted, it wasn’t spicy. It was a damn Subway sub. Not bad, it just wasn’t what I was looking for. After six drinks, it tasted alright though. It was “ladies night” in the bar and we concluded that the place went 1 for 8 tonight. 7 of them were the creepiest things I had ever seen passing as human. The only one who looked “decent” was close to the borderline. I guess the presence of seven other hose-beasts would make number eight look just fine.
So we went down to the casino and I put thirty bucks down on the Black Jack table. It was a $5 minimum and I kept it at $10 bets. We kept even and after about twenty minutes I noticed that Tony had busted out and I was up $20. Rather than cash out, I bet $50 on the next hand. I drew a 19 with the dealer showing an ace. Sure enough, she got the blackjack. What a way to end a table. I came up to the room and “drunkdialed” Teresa, boring her for half an hour with my stupid drunk-ass. I impressed her with all the Spanish I know. “Por favor, manten gal sejado a las puertas” It may not be the way to spell it but I learned it from the Disney World Monorail. “Please stand clear of the doors”. The rest I remember from my high school classes or from various people I have known. “Caillete la voca” I got from listening to the women where Teresa worked. “Llavarse sus manos” I got from the back of the public bathroom door. Any more Spanish and I just might get myself killed. I did attempt to try it a little tonight. I asked Jose if a gringo like me saying “gracias” instead of “Thank you” would come off as me being a smart-ass or if it was alright. He said it was cool as long as you don’t throw in an “Arriba, andaley, andaley” it would look like you were trying to be nice. So I tried it tonight. The guy at the bar handed me my drink and I spilled out a “Danke”. What a freaking idiot I am.
That’s where my day ends folks. Not a lot of excitement but wow, what a really screwed up day. So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m in the middle of a book and I have six more pages to read before I pass out.
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