It's a good thing I waited that extra 12 hours.

Let me tell you a story. Let me paint a picture for you with words.

I was in San Francisco yesterday morning with my cousin David. I'd stayed with him to make it easier to connect with my morning flight. This is the way I roll: I like to get to the airport hours and hours before my flight leaves so that I don't ever feel any sort of time pressure. Yesterday I got through security with roughly two hours before my flight left, which was great. I was drinking my little espresso and chatting with Anaïs on the phone when, less than an hour before my flight started boarding, I got a page.

Paging Daniel Bowring. Please pick up a white courtesy telephohne.

Switchboard Guy had a message for me "from a guy named Jeff ... Labs? He says do not board." End of message. Was there a number I could call? No. Did they leave a real, actual name? No. So with half an hour left before boarding I called the lab and found out that I was forbidden to get on the plane. Apparently, the trip hadn't ever been approved by the State Department, and everybody was grounded. Ten scientists prevented from going to an extremely important conference that only happens once every other year. Why wasn't our trip approved yet? Not clear. Could we expect approval soon? Nobody would say.

Seeing as how I had already checked in and was LOOKING AT THE PLANE I spent a bit of time trying to figure out exactly how much trouble I'd get in if I pretended I'd never heard the page and just boarded. What ultimately stopped me was the strong possibility that I would've had to reimburse the DOE for any unapproved travel expenses. You know, like my plane ticket and hotel bill. Despite what you may have seen on "MTV Cribs: Grad School Edition" I actually don't have that kind of ca$h mOn33Z.

Oh and by the way, three people from my lab had already left. That's right, the official no-go order came a day after some people were in China, at the conference.

The proximate cause of this whole mess is that the State Department hadn't yet granted trip approval to anybody at JLAB. We'd gotten trip approval all the way up the DOE food chain, but the last step was what's usually a rubber stamp sort of thing from State, and it just hadn't happened yet. I found out late yesterday, though, that the ultimate cause was not State Department bureaucracy issues, but some bizarre internal failing at the lab that I still don't completely understand. I'm just a lowly grad student. Don't nobody ever tell me nuthin.

Here is another thing I don't understand: If the approval process is something that can continue to happen even while you're checking in for a flight, then how is anybody supposed to make any long-term plans? Would it have been more responsible of me to wait for official approval before I made any other travel plans? Presumably I'd book my hotel using the in-flight phone? Overall this is a huge embarrassment for our lab - at least two people aren't going to be able to give their talks - and I think there are going to be some fairly angry phone calls happening in the near future.

And now the part of the story where things don't go terribly wrong at the last minute.

This morning I got a phone call telling me that everything has been sorted out and that I'm scheduled to leave on Friday morning, hence the title of this post. Last night I was entertaining the idea of missing the entire conference so I was feeling a little ... exercised. More prone to say cusses. And while I'm still going to miss the tutorial session, things seem to be moving in the right direction now. Yesterday morning I was mad, but I've since moved through disappointment into a weird post-bureaucratic liminal state in which I'm constantly amazed at the infinite variety and possibility of the universe. And in the intervening time I'm staying with Anaïs in Santa Cruz, so things could certainly be worse.

I guess we (i.e. my research group) can stop writing that letter to the VA senators, asking them to intercede on our behalf and slay some dragons at the State Department. You know, seeing as how it wasn't their fault in the first place! Ha ha ha hoooooooly crap.

We'll try this again on Friday.