I’m in Silicon Valley this week for a variety of meetings. I flew in this morning, and I’ll be returning on the Friday night red-eye. Fortunately I had plenty of advance warning about this trip, so I was able to book window seats (F westbound, A eastbound) before the flight filled up – which it did. There was a large talkative guy in the middle seat next to me, and a shrill spread-sheet wizard behind me; thank goodness for my iPod with Bose noise-cancelling headphones. I dozed to Buddha Bar for the first half of the flight, then made notes for one of my Tuesday meetings on my Treo (attracting frustrated glares from the middle seat guy who was wrestling with his laptop). We got a smooth routing, and with minimal headwinds and light traffic we arrived 35 minutes ahead of schedule.

Having got in so early, I was all set to grab my bags*, jump in my rental car, and scoot down 101 to Sun’s Menlo Park campus in time to grab a bite to eat before my first meeting. I’d requested an Avis car, and I’m a member of their Rapid Rental program, so it should have been a no-brainer. Alas, no.

As I rode the Air Train to the SFO Rental Car Center, I re-read my itinerary. What’s this? Budget Rent A Car: Car pickup: San Francisco, CA. And I’m not a member of Budget’s (somewhat anemic) express program. Cursing our travel agency, as well as myself for not catching this, I got into the long line at the Budget desk to rent a car the old fashioned way. It was 45 minutes before I was on my way. So much for lunch….

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* I always check my bag – a probably vain effort to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.