Homeward Bound (sorry about all the parenthetical comments [I went a little crazy with them today])

So to my surprise, everything came together perfectly for my work in Calgary, and I actually get to go home today instead of next Thursday. We must have used up our bad luck and just had good luck the rest of the time, considering how many things went wrong the first day:

•  The project manager missed her flight, I had to handle the kickoff meeting without any maps or preparation
• I tried to send the map to someone else who would be at the meeting to print and bring with but the email didn't go through and Outlook decided not to inform me before I shut down my computer
• There was about an hour wait for customs (every other time I've been through it's been ten minutes)
• They decided I needed a work permit (I've done this same type of work in Calgary twice before without a problem but I guess I caught a real stickler for rules going through customs)
• There was about an hour wait in the immigration line to get my work permit, and I was stuck between two large foreign families with screaming children (by the way, I decided that immigration is just like the DMV, only instead of taking a number you have to wait in line,you don't even know if you brought the right paperwork to get through, and almost everyone else is foreign [note: I'm not saying this because I'm racist-- I really don't care that they're foreign, it's just that most people from other countries have no respect of other people's personal space, which makes me crazy-- that's why the fact that everyone was foreign was bugging me])
• It took close to a half hour to process my work permit, and I kept having to ask the border patrol guy to speak up.  Seriously, after I asked you about ten different times to repeat yourself, wouldn't you realize that you're not speaking loudly enough in the first place.
• I was starving during the whole ordeal since my flight got in around noon and I'd had a small breakfast at 6am.
• I basically grabbed a sandwich at Starbucks and ran to the rental car counter, since it was 2:15 and I had to be at the meeting at 3pm and it's all the way across town.  Thankfully, Enterprise has super employees-- they even handed me a bottle of water as soon as I got there, which was a godsend since I was also really dehydrated after spending all that time in customs and immigration.  Got my car relatively quickly, and they helped me find the quick and traffic-free way across town.

Anyway, the meeting turned out alright, and my colleague got into Calgary at about 6pm, in time to meet the airport authority and the project manager for the prime contractor (we're a subcontractor on this project) for dinner.  She stuck around the next day to help with the inspections, and we flew through most of the airfield.  We ended up losing Thursday to rain (every day while I was planning on being here had about a 60-80% chance of rain) but I got caught up on paperwork and data entry, and got everything ready for the rest of the airport.  We flew through that yesterday, and I got my flight changed to today!