And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line ...........

Well, I was back in the office for two glorious days before being shipped back out to the front lines. For God, Country...........and Pi Research, sir, yes, sir!!!! I like to compare myself to Rambo, First Blood part II, I'm expendable. So expendable that the reason I head off again was b/c the customer dictated one line in an email "We'd like someone from Pi here to see the occurrence". Its all good though b/c I got a handshake and an "atta boy" on Monday when I got back from the new VP and him and my boss asked if they could clone me to help with the new business they stirred up at the Oshkosh avionics expo (where a person died doing stunts in a P-51 Mustang plane and another died enroute to the expo, google it). So, I was home long enough to wash my clothes from the previous trip and repack them. I did, however, score a meet and greet for cocktails with a teacher from match.com on Tuesday so the week wasn't all lost. We went to this fancy restaurant on the Geist Reservoir off 96th street and it was a beautiful day. Perfect weather to sit out by the cabana with a cold beer and good conversation. The reservoir is really nice. Not too big and not too small. I hear they have "Party Cove" style action where everyone ties their boats together in coves and parties their ass off :-D I need to get a small boat next year. Or maybe I'll just strap on a couple floaty noodles and take my changes :-) So, I head out the next morning for good o' Wichita. Again, faced with the scumbags of the airline industry. Freakin' jag off at United wasted everyone's time relaying a story to his boss instead of printing our checked bag tickets. Oddly enough, I go get breakfast at the American Bandstand restaurant and some dude is starting his morning trip with a cold beer. Swear it wasn't me ;-) I fly up to O'hare b/c there's no direct flights to anywhere from Indy. I have 1 hr layover to trek damn near a mile from the far end of terminal B to the far end of terminal F. Thank you very much United. I needed the exercise and stress.
Hello, Wichita. Too many airports and extremely hot. Especially being stuck on the side of a runway monitoring wind and gps equipment while the plane does ground effects. I swear to Miller Lite, the biggest horseflys you've ever seen. And they were just staring at me from inside our van that we left the doors open to. They were just licking there chops looking at this brown sugar. I think one of the even winked at me. FLY's DON'T HAVE EYE-LIDS!!!!! Or, maybe it was something else. I dunno, this heat's driving me crazy........(what movie is that a line from? and "go").
Wichita was a little more fun for me. The environment was the same, getting blamed for everything, but at least this time the guys took me out for fun. We hit up this bar/entertainment place near their hotel for drinks and pool on wednesday night. Very nice. Everyone's a little more honest when drunk. The key is to be the soberest. Especially around clients. These guys were kool though and appreciated Pi's product and gave me the low down on those that didn't. We got some good tests done on Thursday and things looked promising. These dudes were from Tulsa, OK and had been in Wichita for 4 1/2 months. Yeah, total cabin fever. They had a DD every Thursday for "guy's night out" ;-) I'll tell ya, a classy gentlemen's club is nice but every now and then and again, you've got to get a dive in your system to appreciate the finer ones. But its always a good time if you know what you're doing.
I got home without too much trouble but late on Friday. Exhausted from having spent a day in a van in sweltering heat on the side of a runway, I got a video game, "Call of Duty 3", and a case of tall-boys and sat down to save the world yet again. Then at 4am I got to catch Romper Stomper on showtime. If've you never seen that movie then you don't know what you're missing. Its about neo-nazi's led by Russell Crowe in the eighties in Australia. Very nice................