Low-Tech Solutions

Last night it was time to fly from the Bay Area home to Salt Lake. I fly with a friend who lives in Utah like me and also works just South of San Francisco. He usually picks me up at my office and we drive to the Oakland airport. My buddy has arranged parking in a garage close to the airport but it still requires that we walk about a mile to catch a shuttle bus to the terminal. Usually it is a pleasant walk even though it might be in the dark. Last night it was pouring rain. That complicated things.

We knew it was going to be a wet walk and so I picked up some large trash bags from the office. I also had the foresight to copy down the numbers to 3 different taxi cab companies that operate in the Oakland airport area.

We got to the garage and decided it was too wet to try and walk, so we called each of the cab companies. Others must have had a similar idea because we couldn't get a taxi for 30 minutes. That was going to make us late for the flight. Ultimately we had to walk to the shuttle stop armed with only our large garbage bags. We stayed mostly dry until the sidewalk started flooding. It didn't take long before our feet were soaked. Our only recourse was to pull out more plastic bags and put them over our feet. The bags lasted only moments before they succumbed to the asphalt and grew holes.

My travel partner and I made it to the airport and while we were not completely dry, our luggage was, thanks to our low-tech plastic bags. With all of the technology around us, sometimes it is something as simple as a plastic bag that can solve a problem.