Nocturnal manoeuvres

As San Francisco is not my favourite city in all of America, after work today I didn’t stick around in Palo Alto but went off to the airport to catch a flight to Seattle. Consistent with the last time I did this, Alaska’s plane was an hour late taking off, because of rain. Which is a dreadful excuse given they have a big hub in Seattle, and so should be accustomed to precipitation. Maybe it was the wrong sort of rain. 

In the waiting area, there were a very few electrical outlets, monopolised by the kind of prick who uses one to charge their laptop and the other to charge their phone, when they could just as easily plug their phone into the laptop and charge it that way. But I imagine they enjoy having a diffident Englishman hover in their peripheral vision, trying to work out how to politely broach this subject. 

Still, when I boarded the plane (full of people with crap tattoos, because Seattle, and also grumpy middle-aged businessmen who didn’t seem to want to let me get to my seat without actually clambering over them, again, because Seattle) I could plug my phone into the power in the seat, and because it’s a Samsung, enjoy watching it charge incredibly slowly. I think the best it does right now is an hour’s worth of battery if you charge it for three hours. Is this the best Korea can do, or am I at fault here?

Wondrous to discover though, Alaska Airlines have a deal with Gogo Internet right now where you get free access to the internet as long as you’re only using Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or Apple’s iMessage. (And through some loophole, you can also update your status on Facebook from 30,000 feet.) So I could not only stream movies to my phone, I could chat with my wife as she perambulated around the Botanic Gardens with the kids in tow. 

The flight was delayed, and then we were slow getting on the runway and queued up behind other flights on the way into SeaTac, so my 930 arrival became 1055, and rather than wait up, my friends went to bed, letting me know to call them when I got to their place (another half hour from the airport) to let me in. After all, I may be the conquering hero of social media, skipping blithely from continent to continent, but people need to get up to work in the mornings, not wait for some mug to roll out of a Lyft at midnight. 

The weather was atrocious driving over; the Lyft driver deposited me at my destination, and then I called my friends. 

No answer. 

I called again. 

No answer. 

One persistent worry when travelling internationally is whether you’re calling the right number or if you need to add/remove the country prefix. If I don’t put +1 at the start, would I be calling somebody back in Singapore? Or would adding the +1 while dialling locally just confuse things?

I tried both. 

No answer. No answer. 

I knocked on the door. No answer. The rain continued. I began to worry that a public spirited neighbour would see a suspicious black-clad individual standing on my friends’ porch and ring the cops. A spider began to descend from the brim of the hood of my coat. The rain intensified. Was it now sleet?

I called again. 

No answer. 

I knocked again. 

No answer. 

I thought about tapping on their bedroom window but it is round the back of the house and since December they’d put up a seven foot fence to dissuade black clad ne’er-do-wells from getting in the garden, so no go there. I was still cosy and dry, thanks to a waterproof coat and my hoodie and the overhang on the porch, but the rain and wind were both picking up and, after an aggravating dream this morning about having to run from Cornwall to Gatwick to catch a flight, trapped behind slow-walking ladies with iPhones, I was hankering for more than zero hours sleep. (ok, I got four this morning and a micro snooze just after takeoff, but still…)

I advised my wife of my predicament and she pointed out they’d given us the code for their garage door when we stayed in December. 

Which she could no longer remember. 

Thanks, love. 

Happily, a bit of sleuthing through messages and social networks reminded me, and somehow I figured out how to use the control on their garage door, and after more time I managed to get the door to shut again, and then all I had to do was go into the basement and up into the kitchen and not be mistaken for a burglar (housebreakers and people trying to avoid waking small children are often functionally indistinguishable) and then go up to their spare room where the bed was already made for me to collapse into and write this screed. 

And now I can relax.