Dilemma on Travel and other irritations…

Well, Dave and I are going to Capetown with the journey starting tomorrow. When I booked the Award tickets months ago the only flights they had down there in first class where flights stopping in JoBerg and carrying on to Capetown on South African airlines in business. This is fine but after posting a question about it on flyertalk I realized it would be better to go direct without the connect in Joberg where it can be a beast in immigration. Also we would then have to drag our luggage to the domestic terminal while swatting away the “helpful” locals. So. I’ve been looking on the ANA star alliance award tool everyday to see if first class opened up on the direct flight to Capetown. This morning it opened up, it’s an A340 (which I like) and it has availability for the direct flight to Capetown from Frankfurt. Here is where the dilemma comes in. I have two secured first class tickets right now. I know the award people and how bad they can be. I had one ticket on a previous trip get canceled when I called to make a change after they told me everything was ok. I fixed it two days later but It could have cost me my vacation. You have to get the right award reservation agent. I also wasn’t sure if they would have to cancel the trip we have booked to make a change to a segment. In the end it just wasn’t worth the risk of changing them. It still gave me a twinge of excitement that we might get the flight we wanted. So now its onward and upward with the original plan/tickets. I still want the direct flight though. Today is a beast at work too. Paul, my boss, has had the whole weekend to think of things that might go wrong while I’m gone. Not good to come into in the morning. The first thing that happened was Martha (aka Marthra) couldn’t get onto the new mac server again. She sent an email to Paul and he forwarded it to me stating that “ he didn’t want to have to deal with this while I was on vacation”. I had it set up to use our Active Directory for authentication. This worked for a day and then would quit. You would have to re-bind the mac server to AD domain everyday for it to continue working. So this was more of a “it’s cool I can do this” kind of thing and not really necessary for the server to work. I ended up creating local user accounts for the mac people and enabling guest access for the windows folks. Seems to be working fine with one level of complication eliminated. The second thing is Paul is freaking about the Day light savings time change that congress approved and that is being implemented this spring. This is going to happen halfway through my vacation so he wanted to make sure all the patches where installed and working. They are. I did have to push out the fix for Outlook by way of a group policy. Hopefully I will not be getting any calls in Capetown. We also have Dave Wilson on call if something horrible happen, which I doubt. I think we’re going to buy a 30k video conference system after Paul and I have a meeting this afternoon. Should be cool if we get it. The next post will probably be from the First class terminal in Frankfurt on Wednesday.