On the Road

Close to the end of Ms. T’s first trimester, a conference she’s organized forces her to travel to Santa Barbara. Ms. T has always found that a business trip is hugely facilitated by the consumption of alcohol. However, on this trip, Ms. T, in deference to the small person growing inside her, abstains.

The flight to Santa Barbara is relatively uneventful. Ms T is now well practiced in the art of not throwing up in public. She has packed snacks, water, mints and a good book and handles the 7 hour trip with relative ease pausing to gag discreetly only a few times. On the first evening of the conference, Ms. T encounters her first challenge. Seated at a table of computer engineers, she engages in a stimulating conversation about various movies featuring superheroes, spaceships and/or monsters. However, when one of the dinner guests decides that he will spend the remainder of the meal speaking like Jar Jar Binks, Ms. T wonders if one or six drinks can really harm the baby. Despite the very dire circumstances, she refrains and makes an early exit claiming the need to catch up on some work.

The rest of the conference passes and Ms. T’s biggest challenge is brushing her teeth in the morning. She does her job and when the attendees are in session, she naps in her lovely room with an ocean view. Three days pass relatively quickly and she is thrilled when she heads off to the airport for her red eye flight after a very successful conference.

This time, she is traveling with a colleague – a well-meaning but neurotic engineer with very few social skills. Ms. T is tired and is feeling very sick. Her flight is delayed and lands in Vegas at midnight, exactly five minutes past the departure time of her flight to Toronto. She heads to the counter, engineer in tow to find out what her options are. The engineer is nervous; his wife is going to be upset because he will be late. What should they do now? What’s going to happen to them? Ms. T listens to his many complaints as she not-so-patiently waits her turn in line. She arrives at the counter to be told that she has been rescheduled on a flight leaving Vegas the following morning at 10AM - a flight that will go to Chicago and then Washington DC before arriving in Toronto, a flight that will land at 9PM the following night. Ms. T first argues, and then pleads with the attendants. She would like to play the pregnancy card for sympathy to see where that takes her but the engineer is hanging on her every word, standing at her shoulder and whimpering softly. She asks about a hotel room. They explain that they are not obligated to look after them because this was a weather delay. Ms T calmly shoots daggers out of her eyes at them and wishes them ill. After performing CPR on the engineer, she barks at him to stay calm and follow her. She finds a hotel, checks them in (to separate rooms on her credit card because the engineer is now catatonic with panic) and sends him off to bed. She tries to sleep but does not.

The next morning, the engineer calls her to ask what they should do. Ms. T explains that her breakfast has just been delivered and when she is done, they can head to the airport. The engineer was too afraid to order breakfast. He sounds forlorn. Ms. T invites him to share her breakfast. He does. They head to the airport and Ms. T gags every step of the way. She is exhausted and frustrated. The engineer walks two paces behind her asking questions about whether or not she thinks there will be further delays. Ms. T longs to burst into tears and tell him to leave her alone. Instead, she smiles and says she doesn’t know. More than 35 hours after she first arrived at the Santa Barbara airport, Ms. T arrives in Toronto. As she rides the final few kilometres home, she decides she deserves a very big raise.