Getting There is Half the Fun – Part 1 of 3
October 12, 2008
A week ago on a Sunday afternoon, my family dropped me off at the airport. I got on an airplane thinking I was headed to Detroit… only to go nowhere pretty fast for the better part of an hour & a half. Sitting on the smallest commercial jet I’ve been on in years, watching the rain stream down the windows and the pilot and flight crew attempt to charm a planeful of cramped, cranky, unhappy passengers armed only with a microphone and their wit* I thought about taking out my laptop to start this first post and realized that there was no way I was going to get it unwedged from beneath the seat in front of me.
You’re probably thinking ‘well, at least it would’ve been posted sooner’ and I’d reply yeah, but I don’t usually post that many curse words. So instead, I sat there reading People magazine and thinking about how I had gotten there.
This is the first of 3 posts I’m going to write about this. I decided to break it down into three for what seem to me to be very plausible reasons. Reason #1? Because if I didn’t break it into multiple posts my usual long-winded tendencies might overwhelm even the most dedicated of readers – there’s so much to write about after what I experienced in a short 24 hour period. Reason #2 – there are really 3 different types of posts. This first one is all about the trip itself. My usual rambling narrative (for those of you familiar with these little jaunts of mine) that talks about the trip itself, the adventures and mishaps, how I ended up going – you know… GeekMommy’s life as brought to you by the fine folks who keep the Internet up and running for us!** The second one will be one of those ‘all facts, all tech, all wicked cool! Wish you could’ve been with me to hear this in person’ posts. Because honestly – if you got to this site from a search engine query related to Ford Safety Media Forum keywords the last thing you’re going to want to hear about is my travel drama and you’re just going to want to hear all about the cool safety features they were introducing. The third and final post? Well that’s my opinions. Yes, technically, I could be all journalistic and just leave it at number two – but the thing is? I’m not a journalist. I was there with dozens of really talented, really professional journalists and I know that some of them have already done some amazing writeups on the information so you can Google away and read those if you want impartial. Me? I’m a geek, a parent, and blogger – you ~know~ I’ve got an opinion (or 3) so I’m going to express them here. But I will be putting that in its own little post. Again, because not everyone cares to hear what I think… (yeah, I know, right? heh!)
So where were we? Oh yes. Sitting on the plane, in the rain, not writing.
You see, last week, I got a contact from Zoë Siskos – an amazing woman who works at The Social Media Group and whom I happen to follow avidly on Twitter. She wondered if this event that Ford was having Monday would be something I’d be interested in covering. She sent me a brief overview of some of the new features. I wiped the drool off of my keyboard and emailed back that of course I’d love to go!
Since we were short on time and since I had a bunch of other stuff on my plate, I didn’t really push for too much information. I knew that @QueenofSpain (Erin Kotecki Vest) had attended a similar Ford event and had really enjoyed the experience so I signed on board and trusted that the folks at Ford & the Social Media Group knew what they were doing inviting me. I suppose that turns out to be for the best, because otherwise I might’ve been too intimidated to go. There were a couple of other parent/tech bloggers there – Dave Banks from Geek Dad, and Daddy Troy and Daddy Brad from Dad Labs were there as well. Which made me feel a bit less overwhelmed when I found myself in a room full of serious automotive journalists… but only a bit.
Fortunately for me, the amazing @scottmonty (Scott Monty) was along for the ride and he put me at ease right away – as did every person I met from Ford during the experience. So I kicked over into “interested parent mode” and “avid driving enthusiast perspective” quickly and watched as the event rolled out around me.
I will back-track a moment to say though that I did experience my moment of panic. Thanks to the storm, I didn’t get in to Detroit until just past 11pm and didn’t get into my hotel until nearly midnight! Which meant when I found myself without the next day’s agenda in my room, I didn’t dare bring myself to wake someone else up to hold my hand and reassure me that I was in the right place. Again fortunately for me, Tony McCloud from Ford and the aforementioned Scott Monty got me thru the rough bit in the morning without reacting negatively at all to my sleep-deprived mildly hysterical antics.
I should mention that I discovered a neat Catch-22 about traveling by plane these days! You see, as we were boarding, there was a storm looming… we would’ve made it out in time, except that the one lavatory on the jet needed to be serviced before we left. That 10 minute delay meant that we were sitting on the plane waiting to back up when the lightning storm hit. In a lightning storm out on the plains, the Airport Manager (a job my sister-in-law’s Dad used to fill at DIA for many years) can and usually does call for the ground personnel and ramp attendants to come off the tarmac. This is apparently because there have actually been incidents where someone was struck by lightning. So, when this happens, there’s no ground guy to back the plane up – so the plane can’t leave the gate. Additionally, the gate agent isn’t allowed down the ramp, so there’s no way to deplane the passengers. This means that you’re officially stuck in limbo. Can’t fly out. Can’t get off.
Yes, yes – I know “passengers bill of rights… yadda yadda…” but honestly? Nothing the crew can do about it. They’re just as stuck as you are. In this case, they tried to make the best of it, but we sat there in the rain for an hour and a half wondering if the 3rd engine that powered the lights, air conditioning, etc was going to use all the gas before we could take off.
So then. Now that we’re done with the plane drama – back to the event itself.
I found myself getting on a shuttle and going over to the Ford Product Development Center with many other badged folks… most of whom were asking each other if they ‘were in Paris last week? ‘ A bit of Googling that night let me know that they were all abuzz about the Paris Motor Show 2008. As I said – these were some very serious automotive journalists. Fortunately, there were a number of women amongst them. So although I was the only non-Dad blogger there, I didn’t stand out simply due to my gender. Which was a welcome surprise that told me not a little bit about my own preconceived bias.
photo by Erin Kotecki Vest
They started out by feeding us. Then gave us a presentation on the new My Key (which as I mentioned earlier will be covered in the next post!) and an overview of what safety features we were going to be seeing and testing that day. The overview included rules of the track – because yes, we were allowed to drive (under the supervision of some very helpful and knowledgable engineers) on the actual high speed test track in order to experience some of the features in action – and what we were going to be testing for the time we were there. Then we piled into vans by colored bands (mine was blue… and when the blue group was merged into the remaining purple and green groups I noted that I could be either by the simple addition of a different primary color! Yes, I know… ubergeek) and headed out to the facility.
After the tests we were fed yet again – Lunch! And most excellent, I might add – while listening to a more in-depth presentation on My Key showing us a computer simulation of the programming of a key.
It all ended way too quickly. Personally? I wanted to go badger the engineers more, asking geek question after geek question… but that’s not really what I was there for. Shortly afterward we were whisked back to the hotel, then I got in a car with Dave from Geek Dad to head to the airport as we said goodbye to the guys from Dad Labs while they did the same.
The way home saw me stopping over in O’Hare – where my flight to Denver had a wait list of 100 people and a ‘confirmed but not seated’ list of a couple dozen. They were asking for volunteers for a bump to the next flight with flight voucher – and since I can always use one of those, I called up GeekDaddy and let him know I was going to volunteer and would be in a couple hours later. Unfortunately for me, the 2 unhappy gate agents got distracted at the wrong time by the most inebriated woman I’ve ever seen in an airport… and they took my name off in order to bump me, but then forgot to, so they ended up putting me back on the flight. Given that the woman in question was passing out in the ‘premier’ carpeted line and that she didn’t know her own name or the name of the party that had her ticket? I can kind of sympathize. While waiting, I did hear the senior agent they called in to handle her figure out that she was a) in the wrong terminal, and b) at the wrong airline, and c) going to be taken away in a nice wheelchair now…
The flight home from there was relatively uneventful. I was in the exit row of a 757 tho, so I had leg-room for the first time in awhile. But I was happy to be home, yet thrilled to have been included. It’s not every day you get to see life-changing technology being introduced to the public. But as I said – that’s for the next couple of posts – which I fully intend to get to you tomorrow. Sort of a 2-for-1 since it’s late deal.
*apparently, when he announced initially that ‘at least we had free snacks’ the pilot wasn’t aware that United had cut back in that regard just recently and there wasn’t even a stale pretzel to be had in the galley… he retracted it and politely asked us not to mutiny
**and of course, the wonderful folks who host my site – lunarpages.com – and the fine folks at Ford who made the whole story possible.
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