I'm sitting in ORD right now with nothing better to do, so here's my entry for this past week. It was supposed to be a fairly easy week. I was scheduled to teach a workshop at a customer site in the Bay Area on Monday and Tuesday, then have three days in the "office" (i.e. my dining room table) to prepare for another workshop delivery next week.

The workshop delivery went fine. As I was packing up to leave on Tuesday, my cell phone rang. From the number, I was pretty sure it was one of our coordinators, calling to send me somewhere. That's how it works. A request for an onsite person can come in anytime, day or night. The coordinators check to see who is available to fulfill the request and start calling.

This particular request was for someone to go down to San Diego for a few days, to work with a customer who was experiencing a problem with one of our products. The problem was holding up a huge upgrade to a newer version of the product. They wanted someone for the next morning, but were willing to wait till Thursday.

When I first joined my current team, a little over a year ago, I jumped at any chance to travel. Now, I'm a bit more picky. I didn't want to go to San Diego. I had my hands full with other work. But the coordinator cornered me on my home phone (no caller ID) when I was already running late for swim practice, and I figured it would be quicker to just take the trip, rather than try to get out of it.

I was able to put off the trip till Thursday, which gave me nearly 36 hours before I needed to leave. For my team, that is a lot of notice. I've gotten calls at 6 AM to be on a plane at 9 AM, giving me three hours to catch up on the details of the customer's problem, make all my travel arrangements, pack, and get to the airport. I've also gotten calls at 11 or 12 o'clock at night, and had about seven hours to do all that as well as try to get some sleep. I've had teammates who went into the office in the morning, expecting a normal day of work, and ended up on a plane by mid-afternoon. And teammates who have gotten calls at 1 AM, asking them to get up, get dressed, and go help out a nearby customer right away. Obviously, it can be stressful, and it can seriously mess with your plans (not to mention your sleep schedule), but I also find it pretty exciting. It certainly keeps you on your toes.

I spent Wednesday in my home "office," getting as much work done as possible, then left for San Diego early on Thursday morning. Another stressful part of these last-minute cases is that you never know what you're getting dropped into. Sometimes, you get there and the problem is fixed; sometimes, it's gotten worse since you left home. Sometimes, you're working with just one or two people; often, you find yourself facing a "war room" of 10-20 stressed-out customers, alone, and all you can think is, "12 hours ago, I thought I'd be in my nice, quiet office right now."

Fortunately, this visit turned out to be a piece of cake. The problem that the customer was experiencing had actually disappeared on Monday; mostly, they were looking for reassurance that it was not caused by the newer version of our product, which I was easily able to provide. In fact, I spent much of the day a bit bored, trying to stay busy. In many ways, I would have rather had some major problems to fix. At least then, I feel like there is something I can do. On trips like this one, I feel like I've dropped everything and rearranged my entire life -- for nothing.

At least I was able to get out of the office by about 5 PM on Thursday, and then the customer let me leave before noon on Friday morning. Sweet! I called my corporate travel agent to rebook my ticket home. She asked, "Do you want to fly standby on the earlier flight, or do you want me to reissue the ticket?" I knew I'd have no problem getting home on standby, but the ticket was fully refundable (it is company policy to fly on fully-refundable tickets for these last-minute trips), so I figured we might as well reissue it, as long as I had her on the phone.

I got to the airport, got onto my flight, and settled in for a little pre-takeoff nap. After everyone got seated, the gate agent came on the PA system: "Due to the weather [it was raining], we've had to take on some extra fuel, and we are overweight. So we're looking for six volunteers to get off. We are offering $300 vouchers, and a seat on the next flight to SJC. And if you're flying standby, obviously we cannot accommodate you, so you will need to get off as well."

Well, that was a no-brainer! The next flight left just two hours later, and would still get me in to SJC earlier than the flight I had planned on taking (before the customer released me early). Plus, $300 in compensation for getting bumped from a 1-hour Eagle flight, which I hadn't even paid for in the first place? I was off the plane and at the podium before the gate agent! And I was quite thankful that I had chosen to get the ticket reissued, rather than flying standby -- the standby passengers didn't get any compensation at all.

I was hoping to get bumped again from the next flight, since it was still raining and that flight was also nearly full, but alas, they were not looking for volunteers. It was still a great flight. I slept most of the way and woke up just as we were flying over the foothills during the descent into SJC. It was beautiful and sunny over the foothills, which are draped in green, with hardly a building in sight. They simply fascinate me, coming so recently from Texas, where there is no topography like that. As we flew into the valley, the houses got more and more dense, and there was a dark storm cloud covering the entire area, like it was being "held" there by the mountains. I think that is cool as well, how the scenery can change so drastically in the space of just a few miles.

I got home and got on the phone to purchase two tickets to Austin -- my fiance and I had been planning on going back to Texas to look at wedding sites in a few weeks anyway, and my voucher more than halved the cost of our tickets. Not a bad afternoon's "work."

Yes, that is something I did not mention in my last entry: Somewhere, in the midst of all this traveling, I've managed to pick up a fiance . Our story is pretty long and complicated, so I'll give you the abbreviated version. We met in August 2002, shortly after I moved to Dallas from our company's office in Charlotte; at the time, he was on the same team as one of my best friends, so that is how we met. In February 2003, he got a job with my "dream team," the team that I had been hoping to join basically since the day I started with our company. That July, I got the opportunity I'd be waiting for: A position on that team opened up, and the managers were interested in hiring me. When I applied, my now-fiance and I were just very close friends, but we "officially" started dating shortly before my interview. I got the job, which is the job I hold now. In retrospect, we probably should have been more concerned about working on the same team, but we really weren't. Maybe we were just stupid and blinded by love (quite possibly), but there were two other reasons why we weren't so concerned: 1) although I was offered the job in August, my start date was not till November, so I had some time to figure something out if things went sour between us, and 2) we had known each other so well, for so long, that from the start, we both basically knew that this was it.

Anyway, it worked out fine. My company is totally cool with employees dating each other -- offhand, I can think of eight of my colleagues who are married to or dating other employees, including my manager at the time. We were on the same team for over a year and never had any problems.

You already know my job requires a lot of travel, so you've probably guessed that he was traveling a lot too. In some ways, it was easier to date a fellow road warrior. He was certainly much more understanding about these drop-everything trips. But in other ways, it was much harder, especially because neither of us had a regular travel schedule. One time, early in our relationship, I had a trip from Sun-Wed evening; right after I got home, thrilled to see him again, he got one of those midnight calls and left on Thu morning. Other times, I would have a trip one week while he stayed home, and he would have a trip the next week while I stayed home. It was not unusual for us to go three, four, five weeks or more, where we would only see each other on the weekends, if that.

Appropriately, he proposed to me during one of those brief weekends together, shortly before Thanksgiving last year. He had just gotten home from a two-week trip to Toronto on Friday. He proposed on Sunday morning; once I had recovered from the shock, I had to go pack for my own trip, also to Toronto. Yes, he had chosen to propose while I was on my way to the one place where I have no cell phone access. I was literally telling my dad the big news while waiting in the security line, my grandmother as I was walking down the jet bridge, my best girlfriend the moment my plane touched down back in the USA later that week.

Around the same time, he decided to take the next step in his career. He applied for a job in California with one of our development teams, and he got it. So that is what brought us out here. He still travels some for his new job, always on short notice, but they are mostly one-night trips, so it's not so bad.

Now, if we could only get me to stay put for a bit longer too... nah. I love what I do, and he understands that. Still, we both know that we have just a few more years left of this. When we have a family, neither of us wants to be on the road.