Forehead Slap: Whups!

My friend and former roommate John emailed me in July. He’s now a professor at the University of Chicago, and was coming to the Bay Area for a conference. Did I have time to get together? Sure! We made arrangements for me to pick him up at the airport and for him to stay with us that Friday night, and we both went on with our lives. 

Which, for me, included talking to my friend Keith about maybe flying to Minnesota to see the Twins play at brand spanking new Target Field, which has replaced the Metrodome as the Twins home field.

 We looked at the schedule to see when the Twins were at home. Keith looked at his busy travel schedule to see when it might work, and we narrowed it down to this weekend, Sept 18 & 19. After some back and forth for him with his supervisors, wife, and son’s hockey schedule, at the end of August we finally nailed it down, got online together, looked at tickets on StubHub and Craigslist and plunged onward:  $330 for three nice tickets. Whoopee! Expensive, but worth a splurge for both of us to fly home for a long weekend.

 Knowing we now had tickets, I finalized plans with my boss and the next day I booked a flight for  Thursday Sept 16 to Minneapolis / St. Paul, and reserved a rental car.

 And an hour after I’d done all that (can’t you just see it coming?) my wife called me to say, did you forget your friend John is coming to visit you on Friday the 17th?

 *Sound of head banging on desk*

 I. Can’t. Believe. I. Just. Did. That.

It’s not like I travel a lot. I’m kind of a homebody. Puttering around the house, a little gardening, reading, walk the dogs, cooking, some homebrew, a ballgame on TV–how could this happen?

I’ll tell you how: because I wasn’t paying attention, that’s how. Were I a busy traveler, Idda been more schedule conscious.  You see? This is what comes of taking your carefree life for granted.

 Well, what to do? There’s no way I could back out with John. Fortunately, the game Keith and I had bought tickets for was Monday, Sept. 20, against the Indians. Had it been for Saturday or (worse) Friday, I don’t know what I’d have done.

 So I called the airline and said: My bad, what can I do? I got another flight for this Saturday, only about $150 more than what I’d ponied up already, and then I re-booked the rental car, and my boss was kind about giving me an extra vacation day on the back end.

 So I’ll see John Friday, and Saturday we’ll go into the City together and I’ll continue on to SFO and fly Saturday afternoon to MSP, and hook up with friends there. I’ve even added a game Sunday afternoon against Oakland’s A’s, as if I didn’t see them often enough out here.

 A friend and coworker asked me, are you going to tell your friend John what you did?

 I guess there is no real need to; my friend seems to think John might feel bad, but I don’t think he ought to. It was my screw-up. I’ll be glad to see him, and I think it’s half funny.

 What would you do?