Yesterday seemed interminabubble. During the morning class, I perfected my technique of ignoring the ack-ack-ack of our harridan of a lecturer, and stormed through all the remaining exercises. By eleven-thirty, I was done, and was free and clear to reschedule my flight, and, hopefully, get to Seattle early enough to enjoy the evening.

Twas not to be! I couldn't quite catch the early flight out, and the next one wasn't until four-fifty - the flight I was already booked on. So I spent a tiring, boring three hours in the Admirals Club at the airport.

Still, it gave me the opportunity of practising my new social skills. I've been making a concerted effort to be more sociable with people, and, you know what, it's a lot easier and more rewarding than I imagined. Whereas before, if I'd run into a colleague at the Admirals Club, I might have smiled at him and gotten on with reading my book, now I went up to him, slumped into the seat beside him, and gossiped for half an hour. This wasn't work, either - I actually like the guy. There's no way I'm going to change my ways so far as to spend social time with people I don't like!

For the first time in a while, I didn't get an upgrade to 1st class on either of the flights, and I had to walk forlornly to the back of the plane, past my friend Marc who'd bagged a first-class seat and grinned at me in such a superior fashion as I passed him. I did end up with commodious exit-row spaces with an empty seat beside me on both flights, so I can't complain too hard. But oh those "Bistro" meals American Airlines hands out on half their flights!

I'd been up since four-thirty, and the flights just seemed to drag and drag. But finally, I arrived in Seattle, around ten, picked up my rental car, and headed into the city. My hotel was right downtown, a squat Hilton set amidst gleaming, thrusting office towers. They stashed me near the top, on the twenty-seventh floor, with, supposedly, a view of Mount Rainier, behind the clouds.

By nine this morning, I was at the University of Washington to upgrade an application my company developed for them a couple of years ago. It was pleasant to be in an academic environment again. It's something I've missed, although I haven't missed the paychecks that go with working in academia. I thought it would be a quick half-hour job. But things proved a lot more complicated than expected. It was really a comedy of errors.

First, it turned out that it wasn't a simple upgrade after all. The computer on which the application was hosted had been hacked into a few months ago, and the FBI had actually confiscated and wiped it! So there was a lot of setup involved. Finally, around lunch-time, I realized that one of the key software components was mysteriously missing from the CD we'd cut for them. There were various avenues for acquiring the missing software, but the only one that remained, after exhausting the others, was to get a copy of it from our local Seattle office.

I called them up, and amazingly, the person who would have had copies of the software had been arrested last week. And worse: the police had raded his office and confiscated everything, including the missing software! Eventually, another employee in the office admitted that he had a copy at home, so we were able to patch everything together and get the application up and running by five p.m. The lovely, old Italian-American grandmother, a researcher at the University, who was the main user of the application, was so grateful that we'd been able to get through all the problems, that she told me she felt like hugging me. Fortunately, she didn't follow through on her threat :)