charles takes manahttan

well, i'm back. i'll know if i have a job in two weeks, as they need to let the school year end first.

the real fun is the trip, so here were the highlights:

the trip going there was uneventful. once in nyc, i caught a taxi to hotel 17, which is on 225 east 17th street. only i was dropped off at 25 east 17th street. at midnight. after 5 hours on a plane.

to explain hotel 17, let me tell you a story: my freshman year of high school, my grandfather took me to sweden to see where our family had come from. we stayed one night in a 19th century prison that was converted into a hotel. those rooms were bigger than hotel 17.

when i was leaving, i had made it to la guardia three and a half hours early. good thing. i arrived to find that american airlines computers were down. the consequences of which were three-fold, all information for people without tickets or itineraries was lost, the baggage checking system was shut down, and the system they use to identify people to give a terrorist-level search to was inoperable. this caused a line a fourth of a mile to wrap around the inside of la guardia. and i'm not exaggerating. after about 70 minutes a woman came up and asked if i was checking any thing. i said no and produced an itinerary, so i was able to skip to the line waiting to be searched. 60 minutes later, i was searched, and on my way to the first of 3 gates my plane was supposed to land at. but i had it better than a group of elderly people that were headed to florida: they had to change gates to one in a different section of the airport. this meant another security check. luckily, they had someone escort them past the security check. i hope they weren't terrorists. so now i'm on the plane, and on time! but a 90 minute delay takes my optimism and spits on it. i only had a 70 minute lay over in chicago. we landed in chicago with three minutes until i had to be at my plane. i look up and see that the plane to el paso is on time. the gate i had to get to was about an eighth of a mile from where i had landed, so i book it over there. and the plane is delayed. and delayed, and delayed again. so i call up a friend in chicago to say hi. about a minute into the call, my flight gets moved up to one of the earlier delay times, and i land in el paso twenty minutes later than i had planned on.

that was my (latest)trip to the city that never sleeps.