Pat,
I haven't flown for several years, but I always enjoyed the actual flight. One little story which being ex-Chicago you might appreciate happened about 1993 when I had to change planes at O'Hare Airport.
We'd had a very good flight from London, no hitches at all, and landed at O'Hare right on time. Then we sat waiting for the retractible walkway to be extended. After about 15 minutes the captain made an announcement that they were having technical problems and the city engineer had been called. There were audible groans from around the cabin, and a fellow passenger in the next seat said something like "That'll fix it, we'll be here for hours."
Turns out he he could actually see his house from the runway and was all too familiar with the problems in the city engineer's dept. I don't know if you might have some tales of the Chicago City Engineering, but I gather from your previous posts that Chicago government doesn't always run smoothly.
I think it took nearly an hour in the end. Why they couldn't have wheeled up some steps and let everybody just walk down onto the asphalt and into the terminal building, I don't know.
- Paul.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I do not think they were allowed to do that (wheel up some stairs) because of the labor union to which they belong. I know that if you go to any convention or trade show at McCormick Place, you are _not_ allowed to carry in any tools to possibly be used to set up your exhibit. For example, a light bulb, an electrical extension cord, a connecting cord for a printer or monitor, etc. All that stuff is verbotin. You have to put in a work order (and Lord only knows when it will be done) to get those things attached in your exhibition booth. If they catch you with a light bulb or a multiple outlet cord, etc, the union workers take it away from you. Regards the City Engineering Department, like everything else in Chicago, it is so full of corruption. The Great Flood, back in about 1991 is a good example: Do you recall when one of the several underground tunnels (one of them which crosses under the Chicago River) sprang a leak? A city inspector, whose job it is (or was, he got fired afterward, then rehired when he appealed to the union) to walk through the tunnels frequently looking for water leakage, etc at the various points where the tunnels cross under the river, noted strenuously in a written report that someone had bored a hole in the tunnel wall, and a _small_ drip at that point was leaking, and it needed to be patched up _immediatly, ASAP_. His report was totally ignored; in fact he was humiliated when the 'authorities' (his supervisors, etc) questioned his credentials to know anything about anything. That's how they do things in Chicago; they never act on advice from experts, they always make the expert out to be a damn fool with an axe of some kind to grind instead. Anyway, three or four days later the tiny leak in the wall had turned into a major flood as the Chicago River started draining itself and much of Lake Michigan into the tunnel system and the basements and sub-basements of every single downtown building. (The old tunnel system years ago had been used to carry coal around to the furnaces in the buildings, etc, and carry garbage out; a tiny, narrow guage old fashioned railroad going past every older building downtown had a sub-basement entrance to the tunnel system for that reason.)At street level you could see nothing, of course, but all those buildings had much water (eight to ten feet high) in their basements and many of them had underground, sealed electrical transformer units supplying electric to themselves and other nearby buildings. It took the city several days to find out _exactly where_ the leak was coming from (all they knew for sure was all the underground tunnels [which are _not_ open to the public at all] were eight to ten feet under rushing water going into basements everywhere), meanwhile the water kept rushing in. Every building downtown had to be evacuated, even City Hall; all the stores had to close to protect their customers and employees. Phone service all over downtown was disrupted for three days; most electrical service was out; the banks and financial places all had to evacuate all their workers, their attornies, etc. City Hall completely lost their phone service for a few hours until they were able to set up an emergency outpost for the fire department dispatchers and other 'essential' workers (such as the centrex operators) a block down the street at the Chicago Temple Building.
Finally, the _source_ of the 'leak' was discovered by a reporter for the Chicago Tribune who was crossing the river on the Clark Street bridge. He noticed something he thought 'very odd'; at one point below in the water, there was a 'whirlpool' effect, much like a bathtub would empty into a drain. He notified the City Engineering Department; after they, and Mayor Daley had properly abused and vilified him, like they do anyone who knows nothing about anything, they went to look for themselves. Their maps showed them there was a branch on the old tunnel system there, and an underwater diver confirmed that was the spot where the river and the lake were emptying out into the basements and sub-basements of downtown Chicago. With several tons of concrete powder mix poured over the Clark Street bridge into the water below at the point where the 'whirlpool' was seen, they managed to block the leak, or at least slow it down considerably, so that underwater divers could go through the tunnel to that spot and do the job right. Mayor Daley went on television later that Sunday about noon to announce to everyone 'we found the leak, and have stopped the flood.'
For the next few days, everywhere downtown was an uproar, as the office workers came back from their unexpected week long holiday. Any place you walked on the sidewalk you had to navigate these huge hoses snaking out of office buildings attached to very noisy gasoline driven pumps sitting on the sidewalks disgorging their filthy river/lake water into street sewers. The office buildings were able to get maybe one or two out of their bank of elevators running; all the downtown restaurants had to stay closed for a couple of days until the Board of Health could inspect their utensils, drinking water, etc. The subway trains were only partially operating; over all it was a terrible mess. Mayor Daley promptly fired the Engineering Department employee he said had 'caused the problem' and a few maintainence people he said were 'lazy' and 'corrupt' and had ignored the Engineering Department memo.
All the fired city workers appealed and got their jobs back except the one who it was alleged had bored the hole in the tunnel wall that got the whole mess started and he got his job back a few years later when the city was unable to prove who did what, despite a one year-long inquiry by the city council which found several individuals in contempt of city council for refusing to testify as to who did what, etc. Eventually they all became friends once again; that's how it goes in Chicago. PAT]