the lovely misreading

A second, and closer, look at my train ticket and my plane ticket shows me that I'm on the Paris-Niort train on October 12, not October 11, which is the date I arrive in Paris. On the downside, this means spending a night in Paris, a city now filled with aggressive scammers. On the upside, this means I don't have to rush to take that train: I have a whole day to reach it.

When I had originally put in my vacation request for this month, I gave my company's HR department a certain set of travel dates, but my actual travel dates are, in reality, different by two days: I'll be gone for 16 days, not 14. To make up for the extra two days' travel, I worked over the weekend two weekends ago: about 21 hours' worth of work to finish up a project. With that comp time under my belt, I'll be traveling—in theory, at least—guilt-free. And since my R&D department is about to enter a major transitional period, this is a great time to be gone: things are getting chaotic, and everyone's distracted. My new boss, who's a bit scatterbrained to begin with, won't be keeping a close watch on my travel dates, so no sweat.

All in all, as I told my buddy Dominique, ça tombe bien—it all works out. No stress in making the train, an interesting night in Paris (I'll be spending the night there again the day before my departure from France), and about two weeks in one of my favorite countries in the world... as long as I don't think about politics.