Blogging from Mediation Hell

Certainly one of the longest mediations I've ever done -- 14 hours now, and one of the strangest without an end in sight.

Without going into details, the opposing side is nucking futz, has more money than Croesus and wants to kill my client, who has little resources and is trying to surrender and yet be able to live afterwards. Not good. In fact the situation doth sucketh most royally.

Adding to the fun is that it is now 2:21 am in my head, and 11:25pm local.

I'm now blogging in yet another of the interminable breaks as the other side takes its sweet time and devises its next sadistic beating to deliver.

Update: After 18 hours straight it settled.

Next day I was so wired I got up after 3 hours sleep, wandered around the city then after breakfast went to the airport, got on a super full plane and went home.

Of course the plane was so full they were grabbing our carry ons and checking them before we could say a word as they said all the overhead bins were full already. I realized after the gate attendant grabbed mine that I had my car keys in it, so the potential for disaster was high, especially as it had his hastily scrawled hand-written tag with DTW and the flight number on it.

Adding to the fun was this was the slowest loading flight ever, departing 40 minutes late on an Airbus A321 and it was 100% full with all of the 185 seats occupied. We were flying back economy this time complete with a lady right behind us with a voice like nails on a chalk board who could not stop talking for 5 hours straight. On the upside the guy in the seat beside us was a neat fellow from Goldsboro NC and we had a nice conversation.

We arrived at our stop over in Charlotte NC where we should have had an hour layover, but instead they were already loading the flight to Detroit in the other concourse, so no time for lunch?Dinner? who knows what meal at that point, and we ran over and were some of the last people to get on board, again on a pretty full flight. We figured we were toast as there was no chance our involuntarily checked bags made it (impressively enough the bags did make it). We arrived back in Detroit around midnight, I was home by 1am and quickly passed out.