Many - if not most - people think that the life of a professor is relatively boring. As a counterexample, I will try to offer in this post, an account of the type of adventure as mundane a task as a speaking engagement can generate.
Without loss of generality (a bit funny, since this is a phrase commonly used in physics papers), I will give an account of a generic experience (any resemblance to existing institutions or people is purely coincidental - haha).
Getting Invited
I was interested in speaking at and visiting a certain research institute in a certain country. So I made sure I ran into and introduced myself to one of the friendly senior professors from that institute at a conference elsewhere. Then later I emailed him, a few months in advance of my intended visit, asking if I could come. He replied with a generous invitation, but without specifying the precise dates. When my dates of choice were about a month away, I wrote to him suggesting those specific dates. He in turn introduced a junior colleague who would handle my details.
The visit dates were finalized and I had already booked the flight tickets, when we realized that since I was not a citizen, and the institute was under the Department of Space (a bit funny, since scientific institutions are notoriously and perennially short of space), I needed special permission for campus access from higher ups in the government.
I filled out the form they sent me, but did not hear back from the junior professor. Two days before my flight, I wrote him saying if I did not receive permission by the day before the flight, I would consider my talk canceled. I did not hear back from him or from anybody else.
But I took the flight any way, since I had touristic interests: I had never been to that city before; a major politician was reputed to have made it especially modern, clean and safe; the memorial home, near the riverfront, of a historical national figure was also an attraction. I booked a hotel close to the biggest - and much vaunted - mall in the city; rather than one close to campus, as planned originally. Considering myself freed from my academic duties, I began looking online for interesting places to visit.
Traveling
The flight stayed on the ground for an hour after boarding us. Apparently the air conditioning would only work when the plane was airborne. So the passengers started getting roasted on the tarmac. Somehow, from my aisle seat, I was catching a draft from another fan, so the heat did not bother me that much. But the couple in the middle and window seats in my row were getting tortured as the fans (the small ones overhead) in our row were not working.
They fanned themselves with the airlines magazines, requested the flight attendants repeatedly to fix the problem, turned to me accusingly after a while and asked how come I wasn't feeling hot, eventually lost their tempers, made on the spot and posted on Twitter a video about their predicament suggesting train travel as an urgent alternative to flying in this oven, and were finally rescued by two young men from the rear of the plane who agreed to swap seats with them.
One of these fine young men took the window seat; the other one asked me to move to the middle, so he could take the aisle seat. I refused without explaining that I was claustrophobic; the middle seat would give me breathing problems, the window seat would have me gasping for air. I felt the heat of his displeasure - although the AC came on once the plane took off - for the remainder of the flight.
Arrival
When we landed after about an hour I took a prepaid taxi from the airport. The friendly and loquacious driver, upon learning that I was a new visitor, gave me a de facto tour of the city. I reached the hotel at about 4:30pm and as I opened my phone while waiting in line to check in, I saw a message from the junior professor: not only had permission been granted to me, my talk had been preponed to 5pm that same day as the next day happened to be a government holiday. The campus was about 45 minutes from the hotel - I called back and had the talk postponed to 5:30pm.
I threw my luggage into the hotel room, rushed out with my laptop, and had the hotel call me a cab. The apologetic junior professor met me at the campus gate, which was being marshalled by sten-gun-toting army troopers. They looked dubiously at the paperwork which the professor showed them, sat both of us down inside their cabin, and progressively engaged increasingly higher levels of command on the phone, while the clock ticked past 5:30pm. I humorously remarked to my host that he should call to make sure the students were locked up in the seminar room until I could show up for my talk.
Incredibly, that did the trick. The sergeant immediately changed his tone to his superior on the phone, and suggested that I could be admitted based on the available paperwork, since the talk was likely to be beneficial for the students. I made it to the seminar room at 5:40pm. But we waited for another 10 minutes to start as tea had been brought in - I suspect as a substitute for the locking the seminar room doors - for the surprisingly substantial (about 30 people) audience.
Postscript
The adventure did not stop with that day. The next day, I was invited back to the campus for discussions (a bit funny, since physicists like to always work, never mind holidays). The cab from the hotel took me ten miles in the direction opposite to that required before I realized there was another campus belonging to the same institute which had come up on the taxi driver's navigator. We turned around. This time I was an hour late on reaching the right campus, but did not feel sorry at all, after what they had put me through the day before.
Overall, it was fun.
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