Date: 10-17-95 04:42:18 PM Subject: why I missed my anniversary I know, I know: this title is a "real lame excuse" alert. But this story is nearly 100% true. The one part of it that is absolutely true is that I forgot to call Jennifer on our anniversary. But as you will see, I have an excuse that includes international terrorists -- so it must be true. To put this in context, you need to know that I was away on travel in Europe (poor thing!), and was changing cities every 20 hours or so. You also need to know that my anniversary (October 17) brings disasters, natural and man-made, every couple of years. 1987 -- the stock market crash 1989 -- the earthquake 1991 -- another stock market crash And this year (1995) 29 were injured in a Paris subway bombing. And I was in Paris that day. Now the fact that there was an explosion nearby *should* have tipped me off that it was my anniversary. But I was very busy, and I depended on my computer calendar to remind me of husband-duty. But for reasons that will soon become obvious, that was just not going to happen. Anyway, at the end of our work day in Paris we had to get to the airport. I said to myself, "you know, we could just take the subway and be at the airport with no problems in 40 minutes." And then I said to myself, "oh, don't be rediculous--take a cab...the execs you're with will think you cheap otherwise. besides, with the bomb this morning, the subway will be a mess" So we pile into a cab, and land smack in the middle of gridlock on the peripherique...because (guess why!) everyone decided to drive instead of taking the subways where bombs go off twice a month. The peripherique is one of those smart highways that dynamically re-directs traffic depending on the load, and is has nifty computer read outs that tell you how many hours it will take you to get to your off-ramp. And of course, being the only passenger in the cab to read French I was the only one who knew we weren't going to make the last flight out. I had about two hours in that cab to contemplate the looks on my boss' face when I informed her that, well, we had to sacrifice $1200 worth of pre-paid hotel rooms AND pay for a second set of hotel rooms plus extra fees because of some traffic. While in the cab, I saw many subway trains headed for the airport zoom by. Luckily, we DID make it, and got to Frankfurt only a little the worse for wear. Our luggage, of course, had been routed to Amsterdam. So, we got to wait in the airport for an extra hour, pulling out information from our briefcases and filling out forms and retrieving our luggage from the transfer area. ARE YOU STILL WITH ME?? You missed an important clue here! THEN we got to take a $100 15-minute cab ride to Weisbaden, and when we got out of the cab I say to himself "where's my briefcase" (because that's where my money and my passport and my computer and all my credit cards and every form of ID in the universe are). SOOO I'm without money or identity, which is pretty unusual in modern Germany, and now I get to pay $200 for a round-trip midnight ride to the airport. The cabbie gets really ambitious on the autobahn, so we spent most of the time above 180 km/hr, which is about 110 on your speedo. I returm to the airport at about 11 PM, and of course everyone has gone home but the cleaning lady (hannemacher-frau). I ask at airport security about a briefcase at lost-and-found, and they say "nothing was turned in." I then say, "It's a metal briefcase, weighs about 10 kilograms..." to which I get a VERY alarmed exclamation "ALLOY?!?" Turns out there was this little problem at the Frankfurt airport back a few years ago. Plastique detonation in the baggage claim area took out a room full of people. So they are not very comfortable with the idea of unclaimed luggage sitting around for more than a few minutes, and routinely take suspect items out to the runway to blow them up. My suspicious-looking bag had caused much dismay, particularly with the gentle reminder from the morning's bomb in Paris. If not for my name-tag on the outside, my bag would have met a very high-velocity end. The fates were smiling down on me, as the security guys thought that no terrorist would ever be so dumb as to put their name on the outside of a bomb...but then, this might be a new hint of verisimilitude meant to trick bomb squads! Airport security first thought of submersing the breifcase in water (the next-most-likely thing to ruin my computer's day), but then decided to X-ray it from about 30 different angles. They couldn't figure out what would weigh so much in an obviously light briefcase, and they did a great job of overexposing the film in my camera. But they finally decided that the briefcase might not explode, and put my time- bomb into their special bomb-proof secure storage area with the special electronic lock on it. YOU MISSED ANOTHER CLUE! Well, by the time security stopped interrogating me about why I didn't have an ID or a passport or a set of tickets, they detected some circular logic and figured out I really would need to open my briefcase to satisfy their questions. So, off to the secure storage area. Which, of course, nobody had the combination to. We all looked at eachother blankly, and some security guys go off muttering teutonically, trying to find somebody with a clue of today's combination. That's right, daily codes. Actually, everybody but me left the area, and they never came back again. But a friendly Air France flight attendant (to quote Dave Barry, I'm not making any of this up) said "oh, I know what it is--8043!! Just go open it up yourself and take out your bag" Thirty minutes after having been a security risk, I was now the sole proprietor of the airport's high-security area. Bag in hand, I sped back on the autobahn to the fastidiously clean and always punctual hotel bar in order to disperse the excess adrenaline in my system. After only four $9 German beers, I immediately realized that yesterday was my anniversary. The deadline had passed: there was no point in trying to call and redeem myself. This was only going to be fixed with an expensive trip to the jewelers.