It's A Small World

Think about the connections we have with people. Think about how you might have crossed paths with them in the past and maybe never knew it. How has this affected your life? Has it been a good or bad thing?

I love looking back at life seeing how things happened and seeing how things connected to cause one thing to happen that has importance to your life. Many times we have connections with people due to certain round about ways. It might be through a friend who you had no idea that they knew each other.

What is really cool is when you meet someone and you find out that they were at an event you were at and probably even saw each other but never realized it. I have a friend who this happened to. I was working a concert about two years ago and saw almost everyone come in and come to find out this year that they were there and that we almost undoubtedly saw each other but never realized it until about two weeks ago. It is really cool when things like that happen.

It is really cool to see how events that happen in your life build to creating this one key piece to the whole puzzle. This happened for some friends and I about two years ago. As follows is an account of what happened.

I was on a trip out east in the summer of 2009. I was out there with two friends. We were flying out of Dulles to Denver. Our flight was delayed by 45 minutes due to weather problems. We finally got on our flight and I soon realized that it was almost guaranteed that Katie was going to miss her connection flight from Denver and chances were that Kyle and I would miss our connection flight as well. We all fell asleep on the plane due to our lack of sleep from the night before. We woke up midflight and I looked at the time and was hoping that we would have been making really good time and could make all our connecting flights. However that was not the case.

When we were about 30 minutes out from Denver they announced that the following connecting flights were still active. However none of ours were listed. They let the people who still had active connecting flights get off the plane then instructed us how to go about getting back on for flights. As soon as we could we got off the plane and got in line with everyone else to get our flights figured out. We were on the phone with people letting them know about our status and what was happening. Some started working on things as well.

We meet a guy inline who I started talking to due to the bag he had. We asked where he was going. He told us Spokane and why he was going there. Katie was going to fly into Spokane as well. While waiting behind he I heard that he got a flight booked already on another airline. So he was trying to just get a refund. However they were not able to do that so he was put on a standby list for the next day.

Once we got up to the desk we started getting Katie’s flight worked out first. We got it so she would be on the standby list for the first two flights out in the morning but a guaranteed spot on the evening flight to Spokane. Kyle and I were able to get seats out of Denver in the morning on United (who we flew on to begin with) to Salt Lake and then a connecting flight to Boise on Delta. While we were getting this all figured out Katie was able to get ahold of a connection she had to get us a hotel room.

We were told to get on the shuttle bus to hotel and we would have a hotel room waiting for us. We got to the hotel and because of our flight situation we did not have anything other than our carryon bags. We got our room, which had a total of three beds, which was nice for the one lady and two of us being guys. We set alarms and got made sure we had a wakeup call because we had to be back at the airport early.

We got about 5 hours of sleep or less between that and our very long day before it was really had to wakeup. We got some free breakfast at the hotel then headed out to the airport on the shuttle. We got through security fast and to our gate. We made sure Katie would know where her gate was located. We all said our goodbyes then Kyle and I boarded our flight. We arrived in Salt Lake and got a voice mail from Katie letting us know she got on the second flight to Spokane. We all arrived home safely.

Looking back the only person ahead of Katie on the list for standby to Spokane on the flight she mad was the guy who we meet in line the night before. He flew out on a different airline and so he “missed” his standby for that flight. Enduing so it allowed Katie to make it on that flight because she was the last standby to get on that flight.