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Los Angeles via Detroit
Sunday, April 17 2016
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I had some last-minute chores to do before beginning my latest Los Angeles adventure, including a load of laundry (a chore that Gretchen normally handles) so I'd have, among other things, reasonable trousers for five days spent working in an actual office. The dogs were pretty much clueless that I was getting ready to leave for an extended absence until I brushed my teeth. The smell of toothpaste (which, for a dog, is probably unpleasant) is usually a signifier that Gretchen and/or I am about to go somewhere, and Gretchen was already off at the bookstore. And there was also the somewhat-musty smell of my backpack as I loaded it, and that smell is never associated with dogs getting to go anywhere. Of course, these nuances of implication were only familiar to Ramona and Eleanor; Neville will learn them over time. I was feeling good about how well we had bonded with Ramona, since it meant he wouldn't feel completely abandoned when I left later in the afternoon. It would be the first time he would be without the company of other humans in two weeks, and that time I'd felt the need to lock him (and the other dogs) in the house to keep him from wandering off down Dug Hill Road.
Because Gretchen was at work and because I no longer trusted the failing clutch of the Subaru, I'd arranged with David to drive me to the airport, which, for the beginning of today's travel, would be the one near Newburgh. That's the closest, most convenient one for commercial air travel. David picked me up a little after 3:00pm and had me at the airport a little over forty minutes later.
As expected, there was hardly any line at security, and I got through quickly and without complication despite the fact that a fairly swarthy-looking man of indeterminate ethnicity was directly in front of me and our bags (including mine containing all its suspicious wires) commingled inside the xray machine.
I quickly discovered that my flight out of Newburgh had been delayed. It seems my plane was one that flies back and forth between Newburgh and Detroit and it had experienced mechanical issues, delaying its flight to Detroit and thus back again. The woman at the gate told me that if I missed my connection to Los Angeles, there wouldn't be another flight out of Detroit until the next morning, and that the airline would offer to put me up in a hotel. In the meantime, they'd provided a cart full of snack food to compensate us for the inconvenience. It was great to have a smartphone at my disposal to warn my new workplace that I might not be coming in until the next morning, though I didn't have the contact information of the guy who would be picking me up. But I found him on Facebook and knew enough about his workplace's email system to guess his email address.
An affable gentleman in a reflective vest showed up and began addressing us weary and frustrated travelers at the gate, giving updates about our plane and making sure we knew we were free to take the snacks on offer. He then attempted to be entertaining by asking us riddles and giving prizes to those who could answer them. One of these was "Which five presidents are not buried in the United States?" though he botched it by saying "born" instead of "buried." Later I saw this same gentleman communicating via walkie-talkie directly to workers on the run way, getting everything coordinated for when the plane from Detroit landed. He was doing everything he could (in a surprisingly relaxed, thoroughly professional manner) to ensure the fastest possible turnaround time on the ground. When the plane finally came in, boarding began the moment the last passenger had left, suggesting no effort (or very little) effort was made to clean the plane. I could be wrong about this, but it seemed to me that somehow they managed to get it back into the air again only about twenty minutes later. Well done, Delta Airlines.
I sat all by myself in the two seats in the very back of the plane next to the bathroom, directly behind a stylish looking man with black fingernails who ordered booze with his beverage. His most important carry-on item seemed to be a small black bag containing a pair of drumsticks. He and the schlubby older guy next to him had a conversation that lasted nearly the entire flight.
At some point the clouds below melted away, revealing what turned out to be western New York. When we passed over Lake Erie, I recognized the spit of land around Erie, Pennsylvania. I was less certain about what I was seeing in the intensively-cultivated landscape of southern Ontario, which was extensively dotted with big white electric windmills. As we neared Detroit, the land between Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie formed an alarmingly-narrow isthmus. I don't know how they did it, but though we'd been delayed at least an hour, somehow we landed on time. Nevertheless I ran through the Detroit airport to be get to my connection in another terminal, following closely behind the drummer with the black fingernails (his destination was Las Vegas I believe). I arrived at my gate well before it even began loading. I then used my smartphone to assure my new employer that I would now be arriving on time.
My seat for the five hour flight to Los Angeles was among the very worst in the airplane. It was a wide-body jet with two aisles and a cross-section in coach of 2-3-2. I was in the very middle seat, with a neighbor on either side. The guy to my right was so big that he spilled somewhat into my space, and he stank of Popeyes Chicken. I'd found the smell of the actual restaurant (adjacent to the gate) to be highly appetizing (I used to eat a lot of actual fried chicken), but the form it took with his exhales, burps, sweat, and, eventually, farts kind of put me off my feed. Without any support on either side of my head, I couldn't securely take my customary long-flight Ambien, though I did mix some Devil's Springs vodka into my complimentary orange juice, and it helped take the edge off my uncomfortable physical state.
After we landed at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), I found my way through the rat maze of hallways to the baggage claim (I had no checked baggage of course) and out to the street. I'd been told that one of my new colleagues named Ky would be picking me up, so I sent him a text message saying where I was. It turned out that he was driving a vehicle custom-painted for my new employer, and this made his easy to distinguish from the other cars.
It seems the woman handling logistics for my new employer is exceptionally good at her job, because she'd arranged the synchronized arrival of the entire remote development team, allowing Ky to drive around scooping us up from the various terminals. I was the first to arrive, so I got to see Ky do his thing. He was 20-something Japanese-American guy who seemed remarkably cheerful given that his job is to watch depressing factory farm footage all day. In among texts answered and sent, phone conversations, and crazy driving maneuvers, I told him about myself and he talked mostly about the hazards of driving in Los Angeles. After a few orbits of the airport, Ky had picked up the rest of the development team and was driving us north towards West Hollywood.
My two other colleagues were Ni and Da. Ni was a youngish woman from eastern Massachusetts who had been working for the organization since November, and Da was a new hire like me. He had a biggish gut, a shaved head, a stylized handlebar mustache, and a noticeable accent from his native Atlanta. He had a recognizably southern form of quaint civility, asking us if it was "okay to cuss" before fleshing out his sentences with expletives. Ni and Da were in the backseat and seemed to hit it off immediately, talking easily about where they're from and the indignities of their respective flights. Ni is a web developer like me and Da had been hired as a "lead developer," which for this organization seemed to be more like a project manager (thus I'd steered clear of it). It wasn't long before he was jabbering at length about his favorite web technologies (particularly Sass, a CSS compiler). His true passion seemed to lie in the front end. While he bubbled over with ideas for things to implement in his new workplace, he also expressed dismay at some of the choices made by Jo, the guy who had built everything we'd been hired to maintain and expand. Why, for example, was Jo against JQuery? Everybody these days uses it, but Jo finds it "hard to read." I was getting the sense that my new boss was stuck in his ways. When it comes to web technologies, I'm that way too (I've expressed my annoyance with fads and fashion in web development in the recent past), but obviously some openness to new technologies is important in a field that is still well within its Cambrian explosion.
Ky drove us back to the "intern dorm" on a quiet street a little north of Santa Monica Blvd. After parking the car in the underground garage, he showed us our "rooms." He, Da, and I would all be staying in one of them, and because she's "a girl" (as she puts it), Ni would be staying in the other. It was, I confess, a little shocking. Don't get me wrong; I'm happy roughing it and will gladly sleep on couches, but it's a little weird to be at my age and employment status and to find myself sleeping in a bunk bed in a room with two other guys after being flown across the country.
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