... and it's happened to me this weekend.

Was planning to travel tomorrow from Syracuse to Atlantic City for the AC chapter meeting. However, it will now not be possible for me to do so and I will have to miss the meeting.

I do my primary personal travelling on a Delta companion flight pass, which means that I am flying standby. Although I had a confirmed US Air ticket for the trip from Syracuse to New York, my return to California after the meeting was to have been on the last available flights from Newark to Cincinnati (a Delta hub) and then on to San Francisco.

As it turned out, both of those flights have been significantly oversold and the likelihood of my getting on them on a standby basis became vanishingly small. Virtually any other trip, I would have just delayed my return another day, but I have work obligations this Monday which I cannot miss.

Therefore, it became necessary for me to leave earlier in the day to insure that I get back to California tomorrow. I will now be leaving Syracuse at 2:10 and flying to San Francisco through the Atlanta hub. It simply became a practical impossibility for me to make the AC meeting. (Had to cancel my non-refundable ticket from Syracuse to LaGuardia, too, though I now have a "credit" with US Air for a future flight.)

Depending on the chapter meeting schedule, I will try to make another meeting. Sorry to disappoint anyone who was hoping to see me (Archie & Neal in particular). I look forward to seeing you at a future meeting.

----- jim o\-S