Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Last Week's Torture Chamber
I forgot to explain why I was held up in a hotel room last week. I was sent out to Long Beach California to attend a two day gripe session/fact finding meeting between the Air Force and some of our buddies on the contracting side of the civilian world. B-O-R-I-N-G is and understatement.
What made it worse was the fact that I was the only person on my team without a rental car, which meant that I was smack dab in the middle of my old college stomping ground, just a few miles from the beach, yet I was stuck in this wanna-be Hilton located in the middle of your average industrial park in Southern California. Rage is also an understatement.
The only good thing about the trip was that during the meeting I was told to drive out to Edward's Air Force Base and go look at the test planes we were discussing. In other words, I got a car, I got some freedom, and I drove out there faster than you can say Supercalifragilisticexpealodotious. I spent the day out in the Desert looking at the latest and greatest toys NASA and the Air Force had to offer (always fun for us plane geeks), and then I left to hang out at the beach for a few hours before my Redeye departed out of LAX.
Lessons learned from this little trip.
A) Make sure my laptop is in working order prior to heading out. Had my battery and wireless card not failed, I could have spent my off time connected to the world.
B) Make sure I have a rental car. No Exceptions.
C) Pack more uniform items and less board shorts.
D) Bring a freak'n camera next time I'm driving through the Mojave desert at 6am.
Stuff they don't teach you in Officer Training School.
posted by El Capitan at 9:43 AM
1 Comments:
LinkedInUSAF Founder said...
Ooooh, too bad when you were in the desert you didn't get a chance to go by the Blackbird Airpark. Been there, awesome - I was stationed at Beale AFB in the 9th AMS (328x4).
You need to make a trip out there some day!