Long-time readers know I'm not a big fan of travel. I am notorious homebody. I like to be with my dog, my chickens, and my nine computer monitors. I like my chair. I like my 50 megabit connection to the Internet (plus two backups). I like my Peets 7-pump chai at my side. And so forth.
But family travel calls, and thus I am here in Virginia Beach. I am doing the best I can with three laptops and a lame-ass wireless Internet connection (whose speed, I kid you not, clocks in at barely half a megabit).
On top of it all, my famous Blogger's Guilt was in full force today, as I was on a cross-country plane trip without WiFi. (United Airlines is still catching up to 1970s technology). Thus, Slope of Hope was pretty lame today, although it still garnered very strong traffic. (Thanks, Iggy, for helping holding the fort down!)
At San Francisco airport, I had an amusing situation happen to me which I'll share with you in order to reduce the aforementioned guilt. As some of you know, I have a regular "show" on the Tastytrade network called "Last Call" in which I discuss the latest happenings in the markets. The show runs from 12:15 to 12:30 PST, and since I wasn't going to be at my regular studio location, I had to make a reservation at the United Club at the airport in order to have a presentable venue and a high-speed Internet connection.
My schedule was frantic enough, what with luggage, getting out of the house with the family, having my trading day utterly interrupted, and all the rest of it, and as any of you who deal with air travel know, going through security lines and baggage check-in are nightmares unto themselves. It was getting quite late, and the German blood that runs through my veins finds being late to anything an unbearable thought.
Suffice it to say that I was getting increasingly frantic about getting to my meeting room, and if you ever saw me when I'm in "hurry" mode, you would be terrified. My eyes are completely transfixed ahead, my face goes Sphinx-like, and I can walk at a pace normally reserved for sprinters. More than several grandmothers have perished by daring to get in my way.
Once I got to the moving walkway, there were plenty of people just standing (as opposed to walking), but when they heard my overly-dramatic and deliberately-loud foot steps approaching, they stepped to the side. There was one old bat, though, who wasn't moving. She was just standing there, blocking me.
Normally I would have politely asked her to step aside, but it was getting close enough to the end of the moving walkway that it wasn't worth it, so I decided to spend those three seconds dashing off a quick thank-you via the iPhone Siri. So I held up the phone (remember, I was just behind this old coot) and said, "I just wanted to say thank you very much. I appreciate it."
Well, she thought I was saying these words to her, and she turned at me and bellowed, "EXCUSE ME?!?!" I immediately held up my iPhone and said, "I was just leaving a message to someone on my phone." She was immediately embarassed and finally picked up her pace, rushing off ahead.
It just so happened that she was heading to the same gate as me, and she wound up standing directly behind me. I made a point of milking the situation a bit by turning around and reminding her that I wasn't saying it to her, I was saying it to my phone. "Yes, well, I thought you were being sarcastic to me." "Nope."
The thing is, I really wanted to say something snide to her on the walkway when she was blocking my way, but good manners prevented me from doing so. The awesome part is that I did get to piss off someone that was in my way without even being rude about it. It was like a Get Out Of Jail Free card.
Oh, and since it's 2:30 in the morning as I'm typing this, I'd better go to bed. But I will say – as for the markets — either the setup we saw complete today is God's Gift to the Bears, or we're about to get completely ripped off again by that {obscenely explicit anatomical reference} Janet Yellen.
