Day 3: Pensacola to San Diego
By JoeBruin88. Filed in Career and Travels |Tags: airport, Career, Dallas, Navy, Pensacola, Skylink, train, Travels, work
2:09 PM CST
After packing all my things, eating a “Deluxe Continental Breakfast”, and checking out of the hotel, I still had 30 minutes left to spare before I was due to arrive at the schoolhouse to finish the training session. To kill time, I thought I would just hang out in McDonald’s with a drink or something, but as soon as I parked, a black transient on a bicycle came up to my car talking to me, probably asking for money. But I could not hear anything he was saying, nor did I want to hear. So I just drove off and went next door to the gas station to fill up, but I had some trouble finding where the gas tank was located on the car. So I decided to just fill up after the training.
I arrived at the schoolhouse, again entering with no glitches past security. The training started on time and lasted for about two hours. Again the session went very well. I had the instructors engaged in the content. I had a gut feeling that despite them telling me that they knew this product, I just knew they did not have a realistic grasp of how difficult it would be to use this product without experience. So I had them try to set up a communications circuit. That activity lasted about 45 minutes. And I think only two or three of them were able to successfully complete it. I was not surprised by that result and I think it had the desired effect: they realized that they need more time in the virtual learning environment practicing so that they are comfortable with the virtual gear.
I wrapped up the training with a discussion about scoring and assessment, as well as future revisions to the product.
All in all, I received very positive feedback; they told me my training was helpful and useful to their needs.
I had lunch at Popeye’s chicken for the first time ever. I tried it because one of the Navy guys that I work with swears by its chicken. I didn’t think it was that good. KFC still rulz.
So I’m here early at the Pensacola Airport trying to fly standby early. There’s some room on a couple of early flights to Dallas, but the flight that I have a seat on right now has some maintenance problems. They’re checking it out and hopefully everything will be okay. I don’t expect that this will be my final post or something. I’ll write more once I get to Dallas.
3:07 PM CST
So I was listening to one of the pilots of this flight with the maintenance problem. He was telling another passenger that there was a computer glitch and they had turned the power off, then reset the computer and turned everything back on. So now they were waiting for maintenance to sign off on the computer. My problem with the whole thing is that the pilot says that this particular computer monitors the status of one of the engines. I don’t have a problem with computers that start working properly again, unless of course they are the computer that monitors the status of the engine on a jet! So I decided to give up my standby seat and just wait for the next plane, which should be arriving in a few minutes anyways. One of the agents was telling me that it’s okay to board the plane. But I insisted: “I’m not getting on that plane.” And so they are assigning me to a new plane. They even had a final boarding call for me over the airport intercom. I heard my name twice. “Passenger JoeBruin88 this is your final boarding call for Flight 3888 to Dallas.” I said, “Go ahead and take off without me.”
7:24 PM CST
Well I did make it to Dallas on the later flight safely. An uneventful flight thankfully during which I slept for most of the time. I got my name on the standby list for the 8:34 PM flight to San Diego. Hopefully, I will make it onto the flight. From all indications, it appears that there will be room to add me to the manifest. So to take up my time for the next hour or so, I decided to have some dinner at Fuddruckers because the burger and wedge french fries looked good. It took almost an hour just to eat that meal, with over half an hour just waiting for the one burger. There were so many people waiting in line and they had only one cook, one cashier, and one person giving the finished orders out to people. Other than that, the meal was great– a Bacon Cheddar burger with wedge fries.
After dinner I rode the airport’s upper level, indoor/outdoor monorail train. This airport is HUGE; yup, it has its own monorail train. It was very cool. Not as fast as Denver Airport’s underground subway, but very cool because it’s surrounded by glass. So you can see parts of the airport as you ride in it.
And that’s about it for now. I made this update to this entry via a T-Mobile HotSpot here at the Dallas Airport, only $9.99 for a 24-hour usage period at any T-Mobile HotSpot.
8:28 PM CST
American Airlines updated the flight info for one of the earlier flights I’m trying to catch. And the flight is going to be over an hour late, which means that I will have to catch my original flight arriving into San Diego at around 10.40 PM PST. So I hitched a ride using the Skylink to the correct terminal. In the process of doing that I shot some video clips of this cool airport monorail and I hope to post them here.
So as I’m trying to fiind an electrical outlet that works, I realize that I’ve lost USB transfer cable that goes with my camera. Dangit! I’m not about to go searching for it in this huge airpport. I’m not sure I’m going to replace it since I have another one from my real camera. But still, I may get one later since it’s only about $12 on Amazon. I don’t really need it; it was just for the convenience of having two cables.