Okay, maybe the St. Louis airport tornado on Friday night does not make your highlight reel. Maybe better, more fun things happened in your life. Well, good for you, but this is my blog. It's all about me ;-) What's new. What's old, what's fun, what's borrowed, what's blue (see music postings).
I am a frequent flyer. It comes with the job. So I visit STL (Lambert International Airport) about 50 times a year. That means in the last nine years, I spent a couple weeks of my life in STL, waiting to board planes, waiting for luggage, bumming about flight delays and cancellations, rebooking flights, eating crappy food, answering email, talking business on my cell phone, filing lost luggage forms, wishing I was paddling a canoe in Quetico Provincial Park, and reading USA Today, Mens Journal and Harvard Business Review. So if you mess with STL, you are messing with me. Mother Nature messed with STL. Watch this dramatic video. Or this CNN video.
And where was I? Why wasn't I there to protect STL, standing on the tarmac with orange batons waving at the tornado to veer north? I should have been there. Sorry STL. I was on a plane in Detroit bound for STL. On queue and second for take-off, our plane was sent back to the gate, the flight was eventually cancelled, and I was rebooked for the 8:54 am flight Saturday morning. Before I left the DTW airport, that flight was cancelled, I was rebooked for a noon flight, that flight was cancelled, and I was rebooked for the 3 pm flight on Saturday afternoon. Saturday morning, the 3 pm flight was cancelled, I was rebooked for a 6 pm flight, then a 9:30 pm flight before being rebooked for Sunday morning. I am grateful for how efficiently Delta handled my rebookings. Had I known it was going to take 40 hours to get home from Detroit, I would have rented a car, but instead I spent the lion's share of Easter weekend in a run-down Clarion hotel next to DTW, answering email, eating crappy food, reading On-Demand Brand, checking flight updates with the Delta app on my phone, not eating chocolate bunnies and wondering if my new pickup was wounded or perhaps killed by the tornado.
Thankfully, no one was seriously injured. Unfortunately, hundreds of windows were blown out of the airport, concourse C is now an open air natatorium, lots of signs were blown over, zillions of trees snapped off, hundreds of houses and businesses damaged, some flattened, and thousands of vehicles tossed, piled-up or had windows blown out. But not my pickup. The brunt of the storm missed it by just a couple parking lot rows, which brings credence to three of the top ten business planning decisions: location, location, location. Next time, Mother Nature, locate, locate, locate your twister away, away, away from people, people, people, please, please, please. Human life is fragile. With every huff and puff, you toss about legions of lives. I have had enough! So I am calling you out Mother Nature. My brigade of Dyson vacuum cleaners and I are going to give you some serious cyclonic action payback.
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| Main concourse windows boarded up. |
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| No one obeyed the traffic signals on Sunday. |
