A nice day in San Francisco


Subverting my expectations, I had a jolly nice day in San Francisco. I woke up after a very long sleep, had a pleasant mile-long walk to the office, and then tipped porridge over my trousers.

(In a tribute to the three bears, porridge in San Francisco is too hot, just the right temperature in Seattle, and too cold somewhere else. Vancouver, perhaps?)

I wiped the porridge off, and then had a day of meetings that, while intellectually taxing, were all enjoyable and had people agreeing to help one another, unlike some meetings where everyone is preening and trying to demonstrate they’re the smartest person in the room. So that was nice.

All day the sun shone, and there were beautiful views over the bay. I got back to our office, prepared to order an Uber… and my phone shut down, having got to 1% battery as the day had gone on.

Undaunted, I plugged it into a wall, got to 2%, ordered an Uber, and went down to the street to wait.

My car was 5 minutes away. In that special version of time and space that Uber defined, it was 5 minutes away for ten minutes, and then when it was approaching the corner I was standing on, the driver cancelled the ride and Uber rebooked me to a car that was 14 minutes away.

For thirty minutes.

I couldn’t believe a car would be stationary for so long, and so I eventually rang the driver. He was stuck in the incredible traffic that is San Francisco’s gift to the world. I walked two blocks to where he was dropping his previous rider off, somebody who was taking half an hour to travel three blocks. When she eventually arrived and disembarked, I was disappointed that she seemed quite capable of walking and probably hadn’t needed to sit in traffic all that time. Although that’s a silly complaint because it wasn’t as if the Prius would have arrived any faster without a passenger.

Still, my driver was a very ebullient Brazilian called Kelvin, and we had a good chat on the way to the airport. I arrived to find my plane delayed. The app gave me the option to choose a different flight for free, which would have been nice if the choice of flights hadn’t only included ones that had already departed.

Still, I suppose it was better to sit in the terminal for three hours and eat dinner at a normal time, than get on a plane and eat peanuts at the wrong time. I even got to play a game of Blood Bowl (a dreadful one where I lost three nil to gnomes, of all things) before getting on my flight. And because Delta felt sorry, or guilty, or sod thing, I was upgraded to seat 1B on the plane, giving me a bigger seat and legroom for the flight home. So, that was a good day.


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