During my masters I had the opportunity of going to Miami beach. It was to present a paper I was working on about the future of vehicular networks and information dissemination on those networks. The conference I was attending was a 3 day event, and since I was flying across the globe I decided to stay 3 extra days and enjoy the city.
My series of unfortunate events ™ started even before I had the tickets. The thing is… I had never before presented a paper in a conference. I was completely unaware that for the paper to be published I had to in fact go to the conference and present it. You can imagine my surprise when my thesis advisor asked me a couple of weeks before the conference If I had everything ready to go and if Mary already had the tickets for me?
Everything ready? Ready for what? What is everything? Who is Mary?
After his explanation of how these academic processes usually go I was left with a list of things that I needed to get done ASAP in order to go to the conference. There were a lot of them. I had to reach out to Mary (which I still didnt know who it was) so that she could set up the Hotel and flight. I had to get my passport, get a VISA, and get a suitcase for the trip. Yes, this was also my first time going abroad, my first time travelling in a plane, all alone, by myself, comigo.
Eventually I managed to sort everything out. I was in a city 4 hours away from the airport. With no car and a plane ticket booked for 11:00 my only option was a night train. The train would take me from Aveiro (my University) to Lisbon (the airport). The plan was easy enough. I would depart from Aveiro at 04:00, arrive at Lisbon around 07:00, take the metro from the train station to the airport, be at the airport around 08:00, fly at 11:00.
The big day finally came, I was so excited/worried that I could not sleep. The cold night kept me awake while I crossed Aveiro from my dorm to the train station. It's a very eerie feeling to be out at that time of the night, your caveman brain really goes into hyperdrive becoming hypersensitive to everything around you. I made it to the train station with time to spare.
I tried to keep myself awake playing with my phone. Waited in this semi trance state until the station intercom announced that my train was late… I didn't panic much, the plan allowed for some delays. However my stress levels increased steadily as the 5 min delay turned into 10, 15, 20. At this point I was pacing up and down the empty platform, looking to the tracks anytime I heard some kind of sound. Eventually the train arrived and even though I thought I was waiting for hours the delay was only about 30 minutes.
After boarding the train man ? quickly reached my spot to verify my ticket. After asking about the delay he said that there were some problems in the track before my station. He also said that we should be in the clear now and that the driver would probably be able to make up for some of the lost time. I sighed in relief. As I was scheduling an alarm on my phone to sleep for a bit on the trip I thought to myself: well… the worst part is probably over, good riddance.
It was not.
