Notes from Philly

Last week my travel-oriented job once again expanded my horizons by sending me to an exotic city I had never visited before. This time I was flung far from home as I took in Philadelphia- the city of brotherly love. Now, I had been to Philly before, but only because that's where the layover is when you fly US Air to Manchester. As I've mentioned previously, I consider this a technicality- You can't count a city when all you do is fly in to the airport, then fly out. This trip counts because not only did I stay in a hotel (that borders the North side of the airport), but I visited Boeing (which borders the West side of the Airport). And actually those are the only things I saw- every day I drove to Boeing, sat in meetings all freakin' day, then drove back to the hotel and went to bed. I saw literally nothing of the city. My physical therapist insisted that I go to Pat's Steaks to get the real Philly experience, but the only (and I mean only) restaurants I ate at were the Boeing cafeteria (which was awesome, by the way) and the Subway by my hotel. I know- it's surprising that I didn't pick up an accent.

The purpose of the trip was for me to take part in a Non-Advocate Review. This means that there's an issue with an aircraft, and they want to bring in a team of people who are technically competent but know nothing about the troubled platform to do a quick review and make suggestions, hoping for something that the regulars have missed. Well, I met at least one of those criteria, so off I went. The first three days were an absolute overload of information that I'll never remember, then one working day, then on the final day we presented our findings. That's right- a full five days of meetings. I've never had to pack 5 dress outfits before. Come to think of it, we have casual Fridays, so I've never even worn 5 work outfits in a row.

The meeting was informative, I like to think I helped, and I'm never volunteering for a non-advocate review again. But I did pick up some observations:

• What the heck is up with people using the word "Incidences?" As in "We have had five incidences of this failure mode." I've noticed it before, but I heard it a lot this week. "Incidences" is not a word! Try incidents! I hate when people take a noun, conjugate it into a verb, and then back into a noun rather than just using the original word. I went on a roughly four-minute tirade about this to Ramya when we were watching MTV True Life, and a girl said that a cross necklace is a "Symbolization" of Christianity.



• Speaking of confusing grammar, one guy commented that he had been working on a long running problem "Since Hell froze over." I wanted to quote Jim from The Office and say "That is not the expression."



• Actually, that guy was pretty annoying. He loved the sound of his own voice. He worked on commercial aviation, and we were there for a military program, which are totally different. At any opportunity he would speak up and say "Hey, in the military world, do you do X, Y, and Z?" To which someone would reply "No, we do A, B, and C." He would then say "Oh, because over in commercial world we do blah blah blah" and talk for several minutes. It was amazing to watch someone establish that what they want to say is irrelevant, then proceed to waste five to ten minutes of everyone's time with a soliloquy that is of absolutely no use to anyone anyway. I think he was personally responsible for the sessions running late.



• Black jeans are alive and well in Philadelphia.



• The Hampton Inn Philadelphia Airport is one of those annoyingly wasteful hotels- by which I mean that every day I would use a nickle-sized dollop of shampoo from the free little bottle, ditto for the conditioner, use the soap, and leave them all in the shower. When I get back in the evening, all the toiletries I used have been discarded and new ones are on the sink. Come on, I used like 5% of the bottle! They're basically throwing away most of the shampoo they buy! There must be a landfill somewhere filled with mostly full bottles of Prell or whatever those generic hotel brand shampoos are.



• The commercial aviation guys did have some fun anecdotes. One of them was about the first time they used composite flooring in the passenger jets. They were plenty strong in all of their tests, but in the field they had a problem because if someone walked over them with severe enough high heels, the concentrated weight on the end could punch a hole in the panel. Apparently this was only observed on the Latin-American airlines. Do with that what you will.

Now this week I'm off to Fort Worth again, and it's possible that I will be on travel the week after as well. This prompted Ramya to say "So you travel, like, all the time." Yes. Yes I do.

Update: It is now 1:43 on Tuesday afternoon, and I'm on a telecon that's a follow-up to last week's NAR. One participant just said "Well, we've seen two incidences of failure mode X." Another (guess who) replied "Well, I don't know what you military guys do, but in the commercial world..." I listened for a little while, then decided to start my stopwatch to see how long he went. Unfortunately (for the purposes of my story) he only talked for another 54 seconds, but still. It's somewhat comforting to know that the old gang hasn't changed much.

Update #2: He started telling another commercial world story before I started typing Update #1, and he's still going.