Conference quark::mennotes

    My great-grandmother also missed the Titanic.  
    
    We were talking about this kind of thing at the lunch table a while 
    back and one of my coworkers had a similar story.  Before he was born,
    his parents had reservations at the Coconut Grove on the night it
    burned down, trapping everyone inside.  For some reason they had to
    cancel their reservations at the last minute.
    
    
    - Jeff

    My kid brother and his wife missed a fatal air flight, that crashed
    into a bridge in DC. Nasty. 

    A friend of mine missed a connecting flight. The flight he missed
    crashed. He hasn't stepped foot on a plane since.

    			Alfred

    

    All this talk about plane crashes is starting to make me a bit
    nervous ;^).

    I was thinking more along the lines of my own experience.  That
    is, I've been working from home a lot under a new "commuter" program.
    One day I was having a lot of grief with modem connections and
    finally gave up and drove in to the office.  I didn't have much time
    and didn't have much money, but after buying lunch I had just enough
    left over to by one raffle ticket to the United Way drawing.  Also
    the last day of ticket sales.  Bango... first prize.  So next month
    my wife and I will be going to Las Vegas.  Now if I can still get on
    the plane ;^).

    fred();

    
    Along plane crash lines.  A friend of my wife was bringing her back
    a beer stein from Germany.  He missed his flight and had to drive
    about 60 miles to another airport to catch another flight or wait
    until the next day.  The flight he missed--the infamous Flight 109 that
    was blown up over Lockerbee, Scotland.

    fred();

Didn't the bass for the Four Tops (the guy who did the voice of Audrey II in
The Little Shop of Horrors) also miss the Lockerby flight?

    Bunch of famous singers, entertainers, have bought the big farm in the
    plane crash game. Buddy Holly, Ricky Nelson,....  

    On the positive side..:) I had a fun one where I was the last guy on
    the field for a gentlemen game of flag football. And I was asked to
    fill in on a pick up team from a drafting department. The group I
    represented was the electronic class. Welp.... My name was mud amonst
    my class mates. :)  My drafting class whomped their butts badly.
    And..:) there were more of them then there was of the drafting class!:)

    
    Back in my trucking days I got snowed in (passes closed) in Denver
    one night.  So instead of setting around bemoaning my situation I
    took a cab with a couple of other guys up to a place called Boogie
    Down.  It was "amateur night" and they needed some "judges"--you,
    you, you, and you.  I was picked as one of the "judges".  "Amateur"
    was basically anyone that didn't work there on a regular basis.

    If you are a "judge" you get the whole show  up   close  and  personal
    ;^}).  If I didn't know what one looked like up close before, I sure
    did after 8^}.

    fred();

    
        I just remembered another one of these stories.  Happened to one of
    my brothers in Columbus, Nebraska.  

    A couple of his friends started a agricultural sprinkler business. They
    manufactured these big sprinklers that make the round irrigated areas
    that you see from high up in the airplane when flying over the Midwest. 
    They invited my brother to join them, but he declined to join  them  as
    he already had a housing construction business of his own, and he
    figured he'd have to finance most of the new company.  The sprinkler
    company flourished while my brother got caught in housing slump and
    went bust.  He spent several years kicking himself.

    A large corporation bought out the sprinkler company and the two
    partners had to fly to their corporate offices to complete the
    deal for several million dollars.  They flew back to Omaha and
    were driving back to Columbus--and were hit by a truck and killed.

    My brother is still poor, but much happier.  (Not because the other 
    guys got killed, but that he was not one of the partners on their
    way home a the time).
    
    fred();
    

    Come ON with the plane crash stuff (I have a flight to catch in about 
    3 weeks), knock it off. (so to speak)
    
    I bet for every missed flight with resulting crash there are far more
    stories about people who were SAVED from situations by flights that
    caught that DIDN'T crash.
    
    Jeff

    Jeff,
    
    
    Where are you flying too? 

    
    re .11
    
    >Come ON with the plane crash stuff (I have a flight to catch in about 
    >3 weeks), knock it off. (so to speak)

    I thought plane crashes and the Titanic would be less stressful to 
    talk about than my divorce :^).

    fred();

    .....for when you breath that last gasp of air. Its all over. Where the
    nightmare live on and on when its the divorce.;)

    Its not less stressfull than divorce if your in a plane crash.
    I am flying SOUTH, out of this winter wonderland.
    
    

    Sorry to continue the plane crash stories, but:
    
     Waylon Jennings was supposed to be on the flight that killed Buddy
    Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper.  I think he gave up his seat
    for one of those guys because they got sick on long train rides?
    
     My brother's 4 best buddies were killed in a private plane crash
    during his freshman year at UNH.  He had been invited along too.
    
    
     -- Jeff

    Note 111.15 by SALEM::GILMAN
    
    Dont practice up on your German in any rental cars if you go to
    Florida.:) And stay out of rest-stops if you do.;)
    

    re prior: Yeah, I know, statistically, flying is a hell of allot safer
    than driving. Probably just walking down the street in the inner city
    is allot riskier than flying.
    
    Seems to me that if you take a large enough sample of the population 
    that you can get close call stories on any topic you want, whether it
    is car rides, train crashes, plane crashes, ship sinkings.... whatever.
    
    Jeff

        Well I did't really intend for this to be exclusively a xxxx crash
    note, but a note on anything that seemed really bad at the time that
    turned out for the best in the long run.  I didn't really want this
    to be a xxxx divorce note either.  Even though my divorce definitely
    had a "silver lining" (not sure I'd want to go through it again
    though %^) ).  Maybe on a little more positive side, I can definitely
    think of a couple jobs that I _didn't_ get that definitely turned out
    for the best in the long run.  One was a job a couple months before I
    started with Digital. That one was a real bummer because I really
    deeded the job at the time. However, that company had a major shakeup
    and they got rid of the manager and most of the people that worked for
    her a couple years later.  Another was an internal job with Digital. 
    All the people on  that team got "tfso-ed" a couple months ago.

    fred();

    This happened to me... a few years back.
    My husband had an ALITALIA flight to Rome one afternoon from Madrid,
    Spain.  I was at home listening to the news when the announcer
    interrupted the program to announce that an ALITALIA plane bound for
    Rome just crashed near Rome airport and there were no survivors... 15
    minutes later the phone rang, by that time I was a piece of ice, so
    chocked I was, I got to the phone expecting the official notification
    when at the other side of the line my husband Bill said " Hi, Anna,
    it's me... well, then I CRIED and could NOT stop and the poor guy
    thought something terrible must just have happened! it took me a while
    to explain about the crash, he said that the traffic to the airport was
    horrendous and he missed the plane for just minutes, so the airline
    steward put him on an IBERIA plane to Rome leaving 10 minutes after the
    Alitalia plane....
    
    since then, he ALWAYS calls me when he arrives at his destination it
    does't matter where.  (that was a close call!)
    
    Ana 

Last winter there was a crash at one of the NY City airports in which there
were some deaths.  One couple that died was a lawyer and her husband who
had reservations on another flight from a rural airport and she had made such 
a stink that they finally allowed them to board that flight.

Kinda like poetic justice in a way.

80)

When I was looking for a job in 1983, I had offers from DEC and HP. I took the 
one from DEC.

Every day now when I take my noon walk around the office park which takes me
past HP, I wonder what would have happened. Pparticularly when I see all the
BMW's, Mercedes', Porches, Corvettes, etc. parked in their lot. The DEC lot
usually looks pretty ragged.

Oh well, it could have been worse. The same walk takes me past Wang (or what
used to be). That lot is empty.

Bruce  

    Bruce,
    
    Those are not real cars. They are cardboard cut outs!:) Look closer!:)

    ....behind those cardboard cutouts you will find some real ugly cars!:)
    Perhaps some old Decwrecks!

    
>Oh well, it could have been worse. The same walk takes me past Wang (or what
>used to be). That lot is empty.
    
    I almost took a job at Wang. Glad I didn't.
    
    			Alfred