Jury Duty, Are You Kidding Me?

A week ago I got a summons for jury duty. It was for the week of Thanksgiving. I already have travel plans for the week so I requested a postponement. I got my new notice the other day. It's for... the week of New Year.

I was like, "Are you freaking kidding me?" They move me from the week of one major US holiday when a lot of people travel to the week of another major US holiday when a lot of people travel. Hawk and I already had penciled-in travel plans around New Year. I guess we'll have to cancel those as I don't think I can get a second postponement on jury duty.

Off to Austin. First Trip in 8 Weeks.

Texas Trip log #1
SJC Airport · Tue, 11 Nov 2025. 5pm.

I'm headed out on a business trip this evening. I'm flaying to Austin, TX where I'll get in late tonight— or possibly early tomorrow morning, given how air travel has been scrambled the past week or two with staffing chaos at the FAA during the government shutdown. At least my flight is slated to leave on time.

This is my first trip in a while. I did no travel the whole month of October. 😨 My last trip before that was a leisure trip to Phoenix in late September. My last business trip was a brief one to Los Angeles 8 weeks ago.

I've got a packed schedule in Texas on this trip. Wednesday I've got meetings all day. I'll work from the hotel. You may think, "So why not travel tomorrow, then?" Well, I'm taking a prospective customer to dinner Wednesday evening, and I don't want to have to reschedule all my Wednesday meetings to travel for it. So I'm flying tonight.

After working in the hotel Wednesday and doing a client dinner Wednesday evening, I'll meet a couple of clients in their offices around Austin on Thursday. When I'm done with those meetings I'll drive down to San Antonio Thursday afternoon/evening. Friday morning I'll meet a client in San Antonio, then I'll drive back up to Austin to fly home Friday evening.

Again you might ask, "Why not fly home from San Antonio?" The main reason is I can't get a nonstop flight from there back to SJC. Meanwhile there are multiple nonstops throughout the day from Austin. Purely on a door-to-door time basis, driving to Austin and flying from there is about equal to flying from San Antonio. The tiebreaker is the reduced risk of flying nonstop. Especially with so many flight delays and cancellations recently, I preferred to book the nonstop versus the connecting route. The nonstop flight might be delayed, but the worst that will happen is I get home late. If my first of two connecting flights is delayed badly, I could be stuck overnight in a connecting city like Phoenix or Las Vegas.

Update: Plans change just as I'm boarding!

Rebooking My Trip at 41,000 Feet

Texas Trip log #2
41,000' over Nevada · Tue, 11 Nov 2025. 7pm.

I'm not even halfway to Texas yet and already my plans for the rest of the week have changed. The customer I intended to visit in San Antonio on Friday couldn't get all of their people together on the same day. Instead we'll meet with them virtually, and probably next week. That means I should go home Thursday instead of Friday, and I don't need a rental car to drive to San Antonio.

Unfortunately this is the way enterprise selling is in 2025. Face-to-face meetings are rare anymore. Scheduling them with customers and prospects is like pulling teeth, and even once they agree to a meeting date they often renege on it. It's like nobody can commit anymore.

Fortunately I know it's 2025, not 1995 unlike a certain senior politician who seems to think "Bring back Johnny Carson [to host the Tonight Show]" is a reasonable demand. (Johnny Carson stepped down from hosting that show in 1992 and retired to private life. He died in 2005.) I anticipated that the customer in San Antonio had at least a 50/50 chance of flaking on us, so I held onto two homeward flight reservations: one on Thursday and one on Friday. I simply canceled the one on Friday. And, as I got the news of them flaking out just before boarding the flight, I was able to do that from my phone while sitting in my seat while the aircraft was still parked at the gate.

Cancelling my rental car reservation took a bit longer. I waited until I could take out my laptop computer for that. Though by the time we were 41,000' feet above Nevada I couldn't get my computer to connect to Southwest's flaky wifi. So I went through "Sorry, that username or password couldn't be found" purgatory on my mobile phone trying to pull up the booking site to cancel the car.