A couple of weeks ago I set out in the world on what was supposed to be one week in California,  more specific San Francisco, Napa and Monterey. Little did I know about a certain volcano lurking in the shadows ready to erupt. But not many days after the  plane put its nose wheel on the ground did the beast start bursting out clouds of ashes covering most of Europe. Returning to the airport seven days later it was really no surprise that the flight was cancelled. An hour later, after twentytwo tries to tackle an automatic answering machine with the airliner basically telling us “We are in awe over the situation. Please call back later. Click.”, we managed to talk to a person in the ticket office advising that just rebooking the ticket was likely the best option. First available seats (if the volcano would just calm down) was in four days.  Now it was more a matter of coping with the situation and finding out how to cover the basic needs.

The first reaction is “money”. Do you have money to manage through the situation? Even with a good travel insurance neither they or the airline company would prepay anything. “Collect receipts and we’ll pay you back” was the answer from the travel insurance. This was not that much of a problem, even though it seems like the payment will be a couple of weeks late. But for many other people sleeping in the airports for three and four days was the only solution. That is really not good enough. I can not help to feel that the airliners and travel insurance companies should feel some ashamed by their handling of the situation. I can understand they may have been caught a bit off guard by the enormous rush of people, but they saw this coming easier than the common man. I also can not help to think that it is really the job for a travel insurance agency to be there to assist when everything else fails.

Secondly, if you have the money, you think about where to stay. Being in the airport the first thought was just to find a basic motel or anything close by to get roof over your head. We were also told it was difficult to find available rooms. Silly. Of course it was difficult to find available rooms in the airport hotels: They suddenly got a couple of thousand new customers over a couple of days. It must have been like chrismas and new years eve at once. It took us a couple of hours after checking in to the “very mediocre” airport hotel before checking online and finding lots of available rooms downtown. Next day was moving day.

Third, you start to think about the responsibilities you have. Either work, family or friends. How do you take care of business while being away? Carrying with you a laptop and having internet access these days give you almost everything you need. I sat in a hotel room in downtown San Francisco in evenings and in the mornings with phone conferences over Skype staying in touch with my projects. I had full access to my server and files back home and could really run my business from there. The only issue was the timezone difference (9 hours). My “new business hours” were approx 6 hours per day; 2 hours in the evening (23-01) and 3 hours in the morning (05-08) local time meaning start and of business day in Oslo, and 1 hour in the afternoon to check e-mails before going out to dinner. It was not a bad situation. Just not used to it. Other people in same situation also used their laptops to have “breakfast over Skype” with their family back home. Not really a good substitute I would guess but for a period of time it seemed to work.

Fourth, and this is where it starts to get nice, you start to think about what to do with all the extra time. I was really supposed to be back home working and doing all sorts of “normal day stuff”. Even though I could run my business from there, being in that situation puts you in a “force majeure mode” where you acknowledge that it is actually acceptable to be a bit offline as well. So what to do with all the extra time. Well, you enjoy it. You go out to continue to explore the world. Eating good food, drinking good wine. Meeting nice people. Seeing awesome nature. Sitting in the park watching people. Contemplating how adaptable we are. Because we are, really.

Situations like this might throw us overboard for a minute. We might be confused, in despair, and run around like headless chickens for a while. But give us some time to calm down and  rationalize and we will come out of it most likely on top, with a bit more “life repertoire” and we will adapt to most situation. Even though I am quite convinced this applies to people in most situations and location, I must confess that SF surely is not the worst place in the world to adapt to.