Volume 12: Pete back in the Bay Area - A short adventure to the Bay Area for NBA finals
Day 1
Boy, that escalated quickly – Ron Burgundy in Anchorman as he sat in his chair after a fight with rival news networks. And, now a thought I had as I sat in 24J on a San Francisco bound United plane on a Friday morning. Just 7 days earlier my boss at work had said the project I was working on would be pushed out a month, and I was being CC'ed on emails as he searched for work for me in the meantime. I'm not one to actively want to be included in discussions about doing work, let alone having do the work that forms part of that discussion. A discussion that was heading in the direction of giving me a piece of work that would take me 2 weeks to get my head around, 1 week of doing actual work, and then 1 week handing that piece of work over to someone else. So, looking at that exercise in futility on my horizon, I decided I didn't like that view and concluded on the Sunday I would go into work on the Monday and suggest to my boss the vision of me watching NBA finals over the next 2 weeks was a lot more aesthetically pleasing to me. Him not looking for work for me, was less work for him, so he shared the vision. Flights booked Monday, accommodation booked Tuesday, sitting in 24J Friday bound for San Francisco. Boy, that escalated quickly.
My initial journey was a flight to Sydney on Qantas. They offered a complimentary newspapers as you boarded, of which one paper had a front page talking about recent bombings. Ideally, you don't want to see the word “bomb” before boarding a plane, and I think if you use the word “bomb” in an airport, even jokingly, they tend to give you 2-5 years in a prison to contemplate whether that bomb joke you made was actually funny, so I was some what surprised to see the newspaper hadn't at least been turned to the back sports page. Once on board, I was delighted to see Qantas had worked some interpretive dance into their safety video. This is why Australia is both the lucky and clever country.
My next leg to San Francisco was to be with United Airlines. A month or 2 earlier United had been in the news for forcibly removing a passenger from a flight to make room for United flight crew they needed in a different city. On that flight United had offered passengers a few hundred dollars to forgo their seat, to which all the passengers counter offered with “how about you give me nothing, and I get to my destination on time”. United then counter offered with a left and right fist to the head of an Asian gentleman before dragging him from a plane. The footage of security staff removing that passenger suggested they were paid a $100 bonus for each punch that landed, so they took to the task of removing the Asian gentlemen with great gusto. People were horrified by the footage, while my initial thoughts were I wish I got as much satisfaction from my job as those security blokes did beating a defenceless middle aged man. For me, I wasn't worried about being forcibly removed from the plane, as I had ticked the “no punching in the junk” box when I booked my flight. For another $10 I could have included “no punching in the head” option with my seat purchase, but my penis makes most of my decisions so I didn't tick that box as I figured I would be paying to essentially protect my brain twice. Okay, I may have made those options up, but something for United to contemplate adding so next time they beat a passenger senseless they can defend it by saying “but sir, you did not select 'no punching' when you booked your flight”.
As the flight commenced I noticed an old woman constantly walking around the cabin. And when I say old, older than any staff you will ever see on a Qantas flight. Qantas have flight staff that list the first Wright Brothers flight on their resume as part of their work experience, so when you look at someone older than a Qantas flight stewardess you assume they must be a passenger (or you're looking at them at an open casket after they've died from what the doctor would describe natural causes associated with old age). It was beginning to bother me that this old senile woman would not sit down, until she got within 2 feet of me and I noticed she was a United employee as she collected my garbage. I hope I'm not still working when I'm 105.
My amazement that a woman that old didn't need a walking frame was soon gone as I begun watching the classic Bill Murray movie Meatballs with a beer in my hand. Great way to start to a flight. At the completion of that timeless classic, I then decided to watch Star Wars Rogue One for the first time. As we all know, Star Wars is set in a galaxy far far away (“far far” I believe is a scientific unit of measurement that equals a eleventy squillion miles), a galaxy so far away it didn't have Asians. Well, at least that's what I thought until this latest movie showed the first Asian in the Star Wars galaxy. Lucky for him he was blind, so didn't have to worry about noticing he's the only Asian in the galaxy, so avoided any awkward discussion with his parents about being adopted. This latest Star Wars movie holds true to all the other movies; in that the storm troopers couldn't hit the side of a planet when shooting their guns. For Pete's sake! The Asian bloke is blind and doesn't miss a target! Yet 100 storm troopers all miss their targets! It wasn't until I saw The Force Awakens that I discovered all storm troopers are clones. Which naturally asks one to ask a few questions. Like did the empire clone a cockeyed inbred person with no hand eye co-ordination? And surely after you make your first batch of clones you do some QA testing? Some minor tests to make sure they know how to use a gun? It's like the empire got a bulk discount if they agreed to clone 100,000 storm troopers at once, and what with all the budget overruns on the Death Star (building a simple family home will likely have budget overruns, you can't tell me building something the size of a moon was on budget) left them with no other option but to take the bulk discount. Ridiculous.
I managed to get some sleep, which was quite amazing as I was still shaking my head over how 1 blind bloke could successfully hit more targets in 1 movie then every storm trooper in every Star Wars movie. It wasn't a deep sleep, so given I had the entire row to myself I tried lying down across 3 seats. That proved as comfortable as trying to sleep during a car crash, so I soon gave up on that and tried to sleep with my head against the window. It was at this point a bloke a row in front of me decided my aisle seat looked quite inviting so planted his scruffy looking ass there for the duration of the flight. And when I say scruffy, I'm talking any immediate response to him asking you a question would automatically be “sorry mate, I don't have any change”. He had a unique scent, a mixture of 30 year old leather jacket and cheap red wine. I was amazed this flight had only cost me $596, a price that would appear to be in the budget capabilities of the homeless.
The flight landed half an hour, which would normally be a welcome thing on a 13+ hour flight, but not so much when you land at 6:40am and your hotel doesn't let you check in until 4pm. This means you will be in your underwear for over 24 hours, something I think not even the Nazi's made their prisoners of war do. Okay, that may not be true, but there definitely has to be a clause in the Geneva convention against a butt being so close to a piece of fabric for that long. It's inhumane.
Of course, when the universe knows you're in a rush, you will hit every delay imaginable. Flight delayed by fog. Flight delayed by mechanical problem. Flight delayed by staff cleaning Asian passengers blood off United seat. And, of course, when you're happy to take it slow, the universe knows this and removes all delays. I cleared customs inside of 2 minutes. Usually I'm stopped and asked questions, like how much money do I have on me and what is my occupation (probably because they assume I'm a body builder competing at the Mr Universe contest due to my deceptively huge upper body), but no questions today. I waited all of 5 minutes for my luggage, then headed for the BART station which, of course, had a train already waiting for me. I got to the hotel sometime around 8am. A delightful middle aged woman at the checkin desk shared my pain (didn't mention the inhumane stuff around my underwear, but I knew she was thinking it), took my phone number and told me she'd call me when my room was ready.
I gave my luggage to the bell boy, and headed to McDonalds for breakfast. As I enjoyed my McMufin an African American gentlemen could be heard loudly informing staff about how he had been punching white trash (if he had of said punching Asians I would have turned to see if he was wearing a United Airlines uniform). I'd stayed in the Financial District of San Francisco before, so knew that ironically there were a significant number of people who weren't financially well off despite the name of the district of the streets in which they slept on, so wasn't particularly surprised to hear a crazed homeless person. I was a little alarmed, but I was confident that I could convince this crazed homeless man that while my skin may appear white, my freckles showed I had an underlying black person looking to escape my body, so punching me would just be another black on black crime. Us brothers got to stick together.
After breakfast, and still with no call from the hotel saying my room was ready, and thus putting me in a position where I could be liberated from my underwear, I walked aimlessly, getting reacquainted with the layout of San Francisco. At around 10am as I walked up Market street I saw a shirtless white gentleman. It seemed a little early to have his shirt off, so this was either someone who'd just been swimming or someone who'd just been smoking an excessive amount of crack. He'd just walked past the Equinox Sports Club which gave him a chance of being the former, but given he was dry and on one massive constant mad shouting rant, it suggested he was the latter.
I continued walking until mercifully the clock ticked over 12, at which point I could sit down and enjoy a beer at a socially acceptable time. I headed to the Irish Times, a short 4 block stagger from my hotel, which I had made my local last time I was in San Francisco. It was with great disappointment that none of the staff remembered me, or built a statue of me, given it had only been 18 months. As I drank my beer at the bar, a middle aged German woman sat next to me. I'm a man who likes to think he can converse with all the peoples of the word, so it wasn't long before we struck up a conversation. She lived near the beach, but had come into town to join a protest rally against Trump's recent decision to abandon the Paris agreement on climate change. At least, that was her plan, until she couldn't find the protest rally, so gave up and headed to the nearest bar for a white wine. I immediately connected with that; great passion for a cause, yet complete apathy about doing something about it. I've been on the couch plenty of times yelling at my TV about the stupidity coming out of either state or federal parliaments, before changing the channel and completely forgetting about it, let alone doing anything to fix the problem. But hers was a unique mix of passion and apathy, enough to get her off the couch, not enough to open Google on her phone to find the protest. I can just imagine her if she did make it to the protest rally; “What do we want...oh, look, an Irish Pub! Never mind”.
She left after 2 drinks, which left me to admire the work of the barmaid. She was serving 6 to 7 people at any given time, keeping a running tab in her head of everyone’s bills. Other bars print a receipt after each drink and place it in a shot glass in front of you to keep track of the tab, not this magnificent Irish woman. This to me was more impressive than anything Stephen Hawking has done. He's a theoretical physicist, all his mathematics is just theory, but this magnificent Irish woman was putting mathematics into a practical form, which to me was more impressive.
I left that impressive mathematical acrobatic show, being sure to leave a healthy tip for the magnificent Irish woman for her daring mathematical feats, inching a couple of blocks closer to the hotel before stopping into the Royal Exchange for a beer. From memory, I'd never been a great fan of this bar. When the barman handed me the bill for my first beer and it was $1 more expensive, the memories flooded back as to why. I'd never had any banter in this bar, either with staff or locals, so the extra cost per beer quickly reminded me why the Irish Times was my local. The one redeeming feature of this bar came in the form of my phone finally ringing. Yes, it was the hotel; my underwear would finally be liberated from my butt. It's a feeling not too dissimilar to the liberation of Nelson Mandela, although his prison time of 27 years was a stroll in the park in comparison to my 27 hours in the same underwear.
I finished my overpriced banterless beer, finally checked into the hotel, where I enjoyed the type of shower that comes with an audible release of “oh yeah! That's the shit!”. Washed up, with new underwear, I was delighted to discover the hotel allowed me to chromecast from my phone to the TV. I parked my tired self on the bed, determined to stay awake to sync my body clock with the San Francisco time zone, while watching a replay of game 1 of the NBA finals. I only made it to the 3rd quarter before my eyelids grew extra heavy. It was only 6:30pm, so I went and got something to eat and bought it back to the room to watch the last quarter. By 8:30pm my eyelids grew too heavy to hold open, so I gave up the heavy lifting and drifted off to sleep for the night.
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