Victory By Other Means - A de-I/Magical Unicorn Pony God of Travel Adventure

You know how adversaries sometimes end up in these weird codependent relationships?  I'm actually starting to worry that the Magical Unicorn Pony God of Travel may be ill.  Or maybe there's some power struggle going on in the lower suburbs of Mount Olympus where MUPGT lives with the other semi-demi-gods.  Because she definitely seems off her game, at least as far as our competition is concerned.

I was scheduled to go to Chicago for one of my regular business trips this morning, meetings on Tuesday and coming back Wednesday.  Well I'm sure that you saw the news about the individual attack on the FAA control facility in the Chicago area last Thursday which totally gummed up traffic going in and out of Chicago.  I didn't know how it was going to affect me but on Sunday night my flights (Albuquerque to Denver, Denver to Chicago) were still OK. 

This morning before I left the house at 5:45 I checked the status again and saw that the Denver to Chicago leg was going to be late an hour because of crew issues.  No big deal.  Got to the airport, went through security, and had by traditional pre-morning flight breakfast burrito.  Sat down to check email and have breakfast.  Buzz goes the phone.  A text from United.  My flight to Chicago was cancelled for mechanical reasons.  A quick call to the airline confirms that there are no seats available unless I wanted to take an evening flight and get into O'Hare at 1:30 in the morning.  That would mean not getting to Joe's house until around 3 AM and getting to sleep at around 4 AM.  I've done that once before and it is a ball buster.  And that was assuming that there wasn't some problem arising later with the flights. 

So I opted to bail.  United was refunding fares because of the big problems.  I arranged with Joe and the clients to conference call or Skype to the meetings and headed home.  I was pulling up to my garage by 7:30.  On a whim I called Gaius Derf and asked if he was hiking this morning.  Sure enough he wasn't going to get to the trail head until 8:30 AM.  Well, had nothing else to do so I quickly changed and had a lovely hike.  I did work in the afternoon.

Maybe the hoofed, horned tormentor of travelers was completely sated by wiping out a nation's worth of travel over the weekend?  But how hard could it have been for her to delay the flight cancellation until I was already on my plane to Denver?  Somehow it just doesn't seem like her to put out such a halfhearted effort.