5:30pm airport post

I believe that in general, travel luck is normally distributed in the population of travelers, and among trips within each traveler. Ever since moving to San Diego, I have had nothing but good luck on my flights to Seattle to visit Jeff. On more than one occasion, I've ended up with an empty seat next to me on a "very full flight," and once they announced that there was only one open seat on the entire plane, and it turned out it was next to me. My flights have been on time, my seat-mates have been quiet and uninteresting (when I have them at all), and I've had smooth travels all around. I've been saying for a while that all this good luck makes me nervous because this much luck seems highly improbable, and it seems that with increasing trips, some regression to the mean should occur, possibly with a vengeance.

Well, I think payment for my good fortune has come due. After last weekend's shenanigans I thought I might be in the clear, but this afternoon as I was prepping to leave to go back to SD, I got an automated call announcing that my flight had been canceled. I immediately called to try to get re-booked, and the person I spoke with made some extremely incompetent mistakes (first trying to book me on a flight that had already departed, then trying to book me on a flight that would give me a 13 hour layover in PDX, then on a flight where my connection left 30 minutes before I would arrive to catch it, then finally, trying to re-book me on my canceled flight), before getting me booked on a flight with *2 connections* to travel a total distance of 900 miles.

I arrived at the airport, checked in, went to the gate, and then noticed that my original flight had suddenly popped back up on the departures board. They have uncanceled it (did you know that was possible? I didn't), but now it is delayed. So now I'm back on that flight, but I have an hour before departure, and I'll miss my original connection in SFO, so I'll be taking the next later flight, which gets me in around midnight assuming everything goes as it is supposed to at this point. The probability of that is anybody's guess.