Circling the airport

I've been waiting this week. Professionally.

I ordered a new MacBook Pro last Friday, which was, in itself, the culmination of many, many months of dreaming and scheming. Ordinarily, I would spend a couple paragraphs rhapsodizing about what I love about Apple computers: You know, why their Operating System is the best I've ever seen; how unbelievably great their quality is; how the MacBook Pro is, in my opinion, the gold standard for laptops; how I've wanted one for years; yada, yada, yada.

And mind you, I still may, if enough interest is shown. but I'm not here this morning to proselytize. I'm here to share some Genuinely Useful Information.

My job this week has been to monitor FedEx's overseas flights. In between this, I've managed to find time to cover events that resulted in three top-of-page-one stories for the paper I work for, so don't think I've been slacking off. But largely, my hourly routine has consisted of:

1. Check FedEx package tracking website.

2. Check actual location of FedEx cargo flights between Shanghai, Anchorage and/or Memphis.

3. Recheck FedEx package tracking website.

4. Perform the necessary time zone calculations.

5. Sigh in disappointment.

6. Go do something else to take my mind off the fact that my computer still hasn't left China.

7. Repeat.

With that kind of experience under my belt, I am proud to offer you, the reader, the benefit of what I've learned this week. To wit:

1. Shanghai, CN is not in Connecticut — I actually knew this one already, but a surprising amount of people don't. In fact, there's a blog dating back to January 2006 that includes dozens upon dozens of comments from otherwise intelligent and well-read people who were of the opinion that the CN abbreviation stood for Connecticut. In fact, a friend of mine who helped me unlock the intricacies of the FedEx delivery system initially made this same mistake himself, even though he'd had the same model computer ship from the same place three years earlier. Sadly, CN actually means China, or I would have had it by now.

2. Shanghai's airport is so far from the actual city they had to build a land rocket to take people there — To pass the the time, I decided the least I could do was learn a few things about the city where my computer had been born, so I did what any college-educated American would do: I read Wikipedia entries and watched YouTube videos. My favorite of the latter sort is a promotional video of the Pudong International Airport's high-speed maglev train. Basically, this is like the monorail that takes you to the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, only it uses magnetic suspension instead of pneumatic tires, and goes 267 miles per hour instead of 30. My favorite part of the video is the train station segments. Apparently, it's someone's job to stand at attention and salute the train as it leaves and arrives.

3. The FAA prefix code for Anchorage airport is amusingly close to the word "Panic" — One of the first things I learned during this interminable wait is that a great circle route between the FedEx hubs in Shanghai and Memphis bisects Anchorage, Alaska almost exactly. Not surprisingly, a lot of cargo planes go through that airport every day. The second thing I learned was that four-letter code identifying the Ted Stevens International Airport is PANC, which I will forever read now as "panic." I'm not sure that you want people planning to fly to your city to think of the word "panic" in any context, but as long as I don't actually have to fly there myself, I don't have a problem with it.

4. FedEx has black hole generators or transporters mounted on all of its aircraft — This is the only explanation for the fact that on at least one occasion, a package arrived 12 hours before it left. Even accounting for the International Date Line, I couldn't reconcile some of the time changes that my poor MacBook has gone through on its journey to me without invoking theoretical physics. I once got a ground crew "In Transit" scan on my package when I know the flight it was supposed to be on was 25,000 feet above the Bering Sea. So the only thing I could come up with was black hole-powered time field generators, or in-flight transporter booths. Of course, it could also be linked to the next, more mundane, explanation (see below).

5. In FedEx speak, "In Transit" doesn't mean it's actually moving — I used to think that "In Transit" meant "in a truck" or "on a plane." No, no. "In Transit," in FedEx parlance, apparently means "between stages." This is the only reason that a package "in transit" would take a full day to go from "arrived at FedEx facility," to "in transit," to "departed FedEx facility." Foreknowledge of this could spare the reader the experience of having his hopes of early delivery crushed like an empty beer can under a biker's boot ("What do you mean 'it just left?' The web site has had it in transit for two days.")

6. FedEx likes their packages to soak up the local atmosphere before sending them on their way — This is the only explanation for the fact that my precious MacBook Pro sat around the Shanghai airport doing nothing for two days, and the Anchorage airport for one day. And don't tell me things like "they're probably very busy," and "your package isn't the only one they have to deliver," or "If you wanted it faster, why didn't you pony up the extra $15 for priority shipping?"

7. I'm lousy at waiting — But you probably caught that by now.