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Close Encounter of the Boeing 737 Kind (Monday, Jul. 11, 2005)

Been busy - seriously busy so the old diary has taken a bit of a back seat of late. Life has been pretty sane as well, no dodgy meetings with Chief Execs, no toilet troubles, no wandering around hotels looking for my room. Well it was pretty sane until I took my car in for a service that is.

Should have been a pretty simple, no thrills exercise, drop my car off at the garage, catch the shuttle bus up to the airport terminal, walk the 100 yards to the office. Dropped my car off no problem, and walked to the shuttle bus pick-up point. Well, I walked to where it was indicated on the map. There was a big Toys R Us, but no bus-stop. Not to worry I thought, sunny day (very sunny day), only a couple of miles to the airport, I'll start walking and wait for the shuttle bus to pass by.

15 minutes later and no bus. Starting to sweat a bit as I come to the round-about at the bottom of the hill that leads up to the airport. At this stage I realise that I'd never noticed how the airport is actually built on the top of a mountain rather than a hill. Whilst looking for a way across the road I notice the steps leading to a walkway over the main road, which instead of going down the other side goes straight across into the side of the 'mountain'. Excellent! A flight of steps and I'm a good way of the mountain.

Make my way up the steps and across the road, spring in my step now at my well discovered short cut. The path at the other side leads into a large car park, and it's at this point I notice something a little strange. All the cars appear to be the same make. Vauxhall in fact. As I walk across the vast car park I at first chuckle at so many sad people buying the same sort of car, when it dawns on me that they're actually all new cars and I've walked into the manufacturing plant car park. Not to worry, I'll just get across to the other side and I'll be on my way.

There are a lot of cars - must be thousands, and I can finally see the exit to this car graveyard. And it's shut. Big padlock. But do you know what I do? I go and rattle the gate just in case it opens. Something about human nature that refuses to accept that a locked door is locked and therefore cannot be opened. And then I kick it. Because of course that will help. So with sore foot and getting increasingly sweaty (must be 30C now) I head back across the car-park to the bridge I crossed 15 minutes ago.

Start my way up the mountain along the more traditional route of the pavement, and I am saved at last, as a work colleague sees me and pulls into a layby up ahead. I run up to the car almost skipping gayly at this wonderful turn of events, and open the passenger door. It then occurs to me that the work colleague is not a 6ft 6" body builder bloke - but this bloke is. Unfortunately I only realise this fact when I've opened the door and jumped in beside him, I'm not quite sure who was more scared. 5 seconds later when he reaches across to his glove compartment I'm definately the more scared, and with a "sorry, wrong car" I jump out and quick step across the road.

At last I can see the office, but the road I *should* take sends me on a large detour in the opposite direction. All that stands between me and the office is a grass verge and a road, so having come this far, the odd grass stain on the trousers wouldn't be the end of the world. The verge is negotiated with ease, and after climbing over a low fence, there is only the road between me and the office, victory is mine! That's when I see the Boeing 737 coming towards me. See from a distance, it is amazing how similar an airport taxi-way looks to a road. Once on a taxi-way, it amazing how big 737's look, especially when coming towards you at some speed. For a split second I toyed with the idea of running across the taxi-way to my destination, but it did occur to me that a man with a lap-top case running into the path of a passenger plane could well be gunned down from some unseen sniper location, so for the first time today, common sense got the better of me and I beat a retreat to to main road.

So other than that, an otherwise normal day. In movie news, found myself being sucked into watching Superman II on the week-end on the assumption that it had really cool baddies and special effects. I concluded that childhood memories should remain just that, Zod with his laser eyes and camp beard, not very scary really. The highlight was when the president of USA handed over control of the world to Zod - classic Reagan era stuff when Americans actually believed they ruled the Earth, though Bush is probably pretty close behind in that thinking....

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