My Trip to Central America

I was sent to Guatemala to Install some software.
So after everything was confirmed, I booked the flight on Friday 9th April ready to head out on Wednesday planning to arrive in Guatemala at 7.20pm local time.


I got in to the office on monday to find an email saying that there was a problem with the backup server and that the trip would be postponed for about 4 weeks. Tuesday, I arrive in to see another mail, the trip is back on and can I leave wednesday morning. Naturally I had abandoned all my plans on Monday, so couldn't really leave until thursday morning. I got to Dublin airport at about 5.30a.m. to find absolute pandemonium in the airport. I had no idea what was going on, but eventually was told that all Aer Lingus flights were cancelled due to weather problems and we might as well go home. Well the weather looked just fine to me. I had booked my ticket through American Airlines so asked where there desk was. Just the other side of the departure lounge. I negotiated my way back there to be told that their customer service does not open till 7.30 a.m. I couldn't seem to connect the companies laptop to any network , but eventually used the wap on my phone to find the American Airlines (AA) customer service number. I called them at 7.00 a.m.just when they opened and managed to get my flight routed from Dublin to Chicago. This meant that I could not get to Miami on time to get the flight to Guatemala, so the only option was to Stay Overnight in Miami. I found out they had a hotel in the terminal, which was very handy indeed.

So I arrived in Guatemala, got my luggage, got some local currency from the ATM, and headed out to get a Taxi. I now had to go to the site rather than the Hotel. I had the address written down, but there was some confusion, and the taxi driver eventually found the place. So it was basically straight down to work.

There were a couple of issues to sort out when I got there. The main one was to do with performance. One of the indexes I suggested be created was not created correctly, so I corrected this and an immediate benefit in performance was noted.

After that I got down to installing the software and then started doing the configuration. Suffice it to say that it took much longer than expected but eventually everything got done. I also had to make a code change to improve the performance and this was the single biggest performance gain that was achieved.

Of course, I was on Volcano watch all week wandering whether I would have my scheduled flight home. I was lucky enough to make the scheduled flight and arrived back in dublin on friday morning.