Being Held Hostage Is Not Fun.....

Today I walked out of the work unit(essentially a large closet on the back of a flatbed, filled with computers) only to be pushed back in and held hostage for the next 6 hours. If I were working closer to Mexico, I would actually be worried that it was humans doing this to me. But no, they were......


Thousands of bees

There were so many bees that they kept finding ways to get into the unit. We must have killed 50. This is no exageration. It got so bad that I had to duct tape a seal around the door frame to keep them out, and even so some still got through. I never realized how small our unit is until 2 grown men try to swat bees while trying not to hit each other and not get stung. From the outside perspective it was probably funny. Was wasnt funny was not being able to get out, stretch the legs, get a drink, use the restroom, etc. until the swarm moved away. Stuff like this always hasppens to me when I go on jobs with Barrett "Stanky Leg" Nicholson as the other engineer. Read how he got that knickname from one of my earlier posts about finding a "dead body" on the side of the road.

In fact, the first job I ever went with him is quite a story in itself that happened before I started blogging.

We were going to do a job in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. We had alot of luggage so we check most of to meet us in Williamsport.
Our flights are from Lafayette-Dallas-Philadelphia-WIlliamsport. We get all the way to Philly and on the way the job cancels. We get the message when we land. It is like 8:30 pm so we decide that we will see if we can catch our luggage and stay in Philly for the night instead of going to Williamsport.

We were switching airlines for this last flight and apparently this was the last flight for American Airlines cause when we got off there was no AA employees anywhere. We keep searching for someone for us to talk to. We finally leave security thinking the ticket agents might be able to help us. There is noone at the ticket gate. SO we then go try to find our next airlines gate, which is no small feat when you have to walk it. We finally find United Airlines and go in and talk to someone only to be told that this was "United-National" and our flight was "United-Regional" so we needed to go to another agent. When only had an hour between our flights and this is cutting a large section into it.

We make it to the right counter and they points us to the Luggage desk. We walk over there. We now have 30 minutes before our flight. I explained our situation to this lady and added "If you cant pull our luggage we will go to Williamsport but we need to know now. What should we do." I have never seen anyone so awful at her job. She tries to get on the radio, says she cant reach anybody, plays on the computer, takes a phone call and then just stares at us. I ask again, "Should we just go get on the flight?". She says "Hold on" and goes in the back and doesnt return. So I am pissed now. We may not only not get our luggage but we may now miss our flight.

We decide that lets just go to Williamsport. We have like 10 minutes cause this lady screwed around. We have to go back through security and while I'm going through I hear the final boarding call. Ileave all my luggage with Barrett still going through security, and takes off with no socks on towards the gate. I look at my ticket and it says gate 27. I look up and I am at gate 3. Uh oh. Bercause of my peak physical condition i made it all the way to about gate 18 before I hit the wall.

I finally make it to the gate, yelling for them to wait, as they close the doors. Im sweating my balls off. I explain to them what happened. They pull the plane back to get our luggage. It turns out the baggage lady never made the call, her radio was off. So they grab our luggage off and as we are leaving they say "All 3 bags will be waiting for you." The only problem is we had 4 bags. They call the plane BACK to get our 4th one off. At this point Barrett shows up with ALL our carry on bags running down and huffing and puffing. He looked like a patrooper.



So guess where we have to go to get our luggage.....yep, right back to old Radio Lady. When we get there she has our bags and she has the audacity to say "I really saved you guys, huh? Where would you guys have been without me?".

Barretts face did this:



I swear to God he had to stop me from reaching across and:


We got out of there as quick as possible to drink the biggest beer in Philly. Apparently things like this just happen when we are on jobs together: Luggage, Bodies, and now Bees.