Four hours: not a long time, but not short either

There’s no compendium today: I’m in Daylesford – with Sweetheart Vivienne and darlings Kate and Meg and their families.

Four hours. Not a long time. But not short either. I couldn’t stand on one leg for four hours. Maybe not even on two legs. Four hours. That’s the time my 9:45 a.m. flight from Launceston to Melbourne last Thursday was delayed. At 8 a.m. before I left home I checked the airline’s website. It showed an on-time departure. But when entering the terminal I saw it’d been delayed. By 75 minutes. The check-in man said the plane was still in Melbourne, With a technical problem. Drat. I hunkered down in the Qantas Club. To wait. I phoned Sweetheart Vivienne. I attended to emails. I reduced my podcast backlog. I wrote blog posts. Time passed. Then another announcement: a further delay. Due to a Melbourne airport security breach [1]. The airline offered lunch vouchers. Thanks for that. My iPod battery drained. I finished the New Yorker issue I’d brought. Time slowed. As if the plane would never arrive. Or leave. But it did. Both. Four hours late. What’s four hours? Not a long time. Better to be delayed by a fixed technical problem than on time with an unfixed one. And better to be delayed by a detected security breach than on time with an undetected one. Oh the delight of commercial air travel. The sheer joy of it. Ho hum.

Finally, I wish you, dear Farmdoc’s Blog readers, a wonderful week.