cancer – day 43

I am such an idiot. I meet so many people at these things, you know, and I have a terrible memory to boot, which is not good when you’re at the airport to fly home and no one has their name badges on anymore. You can guess where this story is going, eh?

So I’m at O’Hare with three hours to kill before my flight, though it’s worth the wait since it’s a direct flight back to Smurf instead of hassling through multiple airports, which my post-surgery body definitely cannot handle, direct flights and wheelie bags were bad enough. Anyway, since I’m not in a hurry, I wander down the other direction of the concourse away from my gate. Lo and behold, there’s a McDonald’s, and you know, I can’t remember the last time I had those completely unhealthy strangely addictive fries, so I get some and wander to an empty gate area to sit down with my embarrassingly unhealthy snack. There’s a flight boarding, so there are some people in line but it’s pretty empty. As I sat down, I glanced at the line of people and had a moment of eye contact with a guy standing in the line. I’m usually pretty careful to avoid eye contact while traveling, it’s just easier to get through when you don’t have strange men trying to chat you up. Well, next thing I know, the guy from the line is standing right next to me and says “Can I have one fry?” I can honestly say no one’s ever used that as a pickup line before! He’s a good-looking young guy, nice smile, possibly familiar but I have no clue who he is or if I know him or if he’s a total stranger hitting on me. No ring. What could I say? I pulled out a fry and handed it to him saying something like “they’re like Pringles, no one can eat just one.” And I set down the fries and go on about getting out my Sudoku puzzle and such, and the guy sits down in front of me. Now what? But he says, “Sacramento, right?” Damn, I HAD met this guy and not remembered. Worse yet, he wasn’t just one of the roundtable officers at the Forum, oh no! He works for Chainalytics! I’ve even advised him about how to get involved with CSCMP and the roundtable boards, albeit via e-mail, I didn’t know what he looked like then. But I did meet him briefly yesterday, and here I didn’t have a clue seeing him today at the airport. Pathetic! Let’s blame cancer stress and lack of rest for the mental lapse.

On the up side for the day, people really seemed to enjoy my presentation this afternoon, which is always nice to hear after. It’s tough to be the last speaker of a conference, the only thing between people and their flights home is you! At least no one left while I was talking, that would have been mildly embarrassing. And they were pretty engaged, now that I think about it. Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that the tornados north of here and thunderstorms south of here don’t create delays for the long west coast flights. Uh oh, here comes the rain. Pouring!