It Was A Bad Day - a guest post by Franco A

It was bad, very bad.

We found ourselves in San Diego on a rainy night in a post 9/11 world at a pre-9/11 airport.

We had to deal with Army guards with weapons just to get our visitor badges. The Ops agent who was escorting us had to talk about surfing on his cell phone instead of watching us like he was supposed to. We had the minimal amount of parts to fix the maximum amount of airplane. Add to that we were both on our 5th shifts (obviously this was a long time ago-Goat) and it should be enough to write a horror novel, but this was the good part.

We managed to fix the airplane without being shot by the Army and in reward, the Ops surfer dude called his boss and told him that we refused to spend the night in their Ops office and that we insisted that they get us some hotel rooms. They got us some rooms all right. Rooms at Motel Hell!

The Ops Surfer Dude gave us a Taxi Voucher and the address to the hotel to the taxi driver. We drove, and it started to rain, and we drove, and it rained very hard, and we drove some more. After about 25 minutes I began to think we were either being given a room out of state or we had been kidnapped and we were going to be shipped to Somalia to be pirates.

Well, we got there and the cab driver dumped us off in the rain in the front of a place that was straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. There was even a strip club across the street and a tow yard next door. We had to walk a block in the rain just to find a 7-11, No decent restaurant could possibly be in this part of town.

The rooms they provided us had a fantastic view of the tow trucks next door and mine had the crisp freshness of nicotine in the air! The company did us right this trip. Right as in right up the %@&%*@! I thought that I could blow the smell away by turning on the air conditioner mounted in the window, but when I turned it on it spat particles of who knows what into my face and the air from it smelled like it smoked 4 packs a day too.

I went to the bathroom to wash off the nicotine that coated my face. I was scared to use the soap as I didn't know if someone had done "The Toothbrush" trick on it and it was dirtier than I could imagine. I dared the "it" and washed 4 pounds of nicotine off of myself and dried my face with the towel provided by the friendly people of Housekeeping.

Imagine that! It smelled like nicotine too!

I thought I had walked in to a hotel room, but I was actually in a box of Camel non-filtered cigarettes with plumbing! Wow! I thought this was only something that could happen in a John Candy/Steve Martin film. I knew one thing right then and there; DO NOT go barefoot in this room.

Well, we left the hotel the next morning to catch out flight back to OAK and as we were passing through Ops I really wanted to show my appreciation to Ops Surfer Dude and his boss by giving them a big kick in the a$$ for the great room and lung cancer that I probably acquired from sleeping there that night.

We were boarded and pushing back from the gate when it suddenly struck me that we never got our Rubio's Fish Tacos from the terminal restaurant. It was a mechanic's mission whenever he went to SAN to hit up Rubio's. All that I endured on this trip and now I would have to admit defeat to my fellow mechanics when I returned to the OAK-Town that Rubio's had not been visited.

Franco A.