After some last minute running around I set off from Gael HQ at 9.30am to catch my flight to London Heathrow(LHR) then on Montreal(YUL).
It was clear from the many boxes to be transported that Lorna and the other guys in marketing had been busy. They had done a great job to get so many customised pieces of marketing material ready for the conference and I was really excited about how professional we would look at the conference. In particular we have the blood filled syringe pens which were so tricky to arrange that I am sure Lorna is now going to refer to them as ‘’those Bloody Pens’’!
When I got to Glasgow Airport(GLA) I realised that I was going to get charged a hefty bill for each piece of over size baggage I had with me...so being the company man I am I took the decision to take one of the boxes on board as hand luggage to save Gael some money. The box of brochures seemed not that heavy but once I had carried it around for a few hours, negotiated security and explored Terminal 5 I was starting to feel the pinch. Despite the really unexciting look of the brown box I was carrying it seemed to be very interesting to the bored security people at Heathrow airport who asked me to open it immediately so that they could search it...at this point I was gutted...how dare they rip open Lorna’s beautifully wrapped-up bundle of brochures and wreck the box that had to be carried with me for the next 12 hours. The people from security, bored as they were, actually supplied me with some tape - black and yellow hazard tape - to repair the box.
An American golf tourist remarked that it now looked as though it contained radioactive material! In an effort to make myself look less like a terrorist carrying a crate of plutonium through Heathrow, I drew a smiley face on the box and so my travelling companion was born...but what to call my new friend? With us heading to the French part of Canada, it had to be something "Francais" - so I settled on "Jacques" as in Jacques in the Box!
Boom Boom!