I am once again on the road. The project I work on, OpenNMS, is having its annual developer’s conference in Minneapolis this year, and I left today for a week of coding with my fellow geeks. Last year we had 5 people show up, and this year it’s closer to 20, so it’s pretty exciting.

My trip started as it usually does with a plane flight out of RDU. While I like the convenience of flying (versus, say, 24 hours in a car), I don’t really enjoy the act of flying. In fact, one of the most nerve racking parts of any trip is boarding the plane.

Not boarding for me personally (I don’t have problems getting in line or finding my seat), but I always wonder who is going to sit next to me. First and foremost I hope that they understand the basics of hygiene. It doesn’t matter how small or quiet your seat mate is, if they suffer from an overabundance of humanity, even a short flight is going to seem to take an eternity.

As you can guess, my next requirements in a seat mate are small and quiet. Not that I have something against large people, being one myself, but the perfect person to be sitting next to me on a plane is no one at all.

On today’s first flight (from Raleigh to Chicago), the plane was full, and when the woman with the two small children took the row behind mine, I was prepared to spend the trip hidden in my laptop with my earplug/headphones on. So I was pleasantly surprised when the middle seat was taken by a lovely young lady who a) smelled nice and b) wasn’t large. She was also probably quiet but I was so taken by this stroke of luck that I couldn’t help but strike up a conversation. She had lived for a time in Colorado, so we chatted about the wonders of Boulder for awhile when I introduced myself.

When she told me her name was Liz some eidetic memory kicked in and I remembered seeing “Elizabeth Gardner” on her boarding pass. Elizabeth Gardner happens to be the name of a local weatherwoman and so it stuck with me.

I’m sure she thought I was a stalker when I replied “Elizabeth Gardner?” but I quickly pointed out that I had seen her boarding pass and I’m just the type of guy who reads things like that. I can’t help it. It gets me into trouble since young woman tend to wear short-shorts these days with words across their backsides like “Hot Stuff”. I also think it’s apt that as I left the airplane I saw a guy wearing a black t-shirt with tiny white writing on it. When I got close enough to read it, it said “Nosy little fucker, aren’t you?”. I just had to laugh.

Anyway, back to the story. To make myself seem less crazy that I am, I brought up the weatherlady to Liz. She laughed and said people usually bring her up upon hearing her name. Well, that and the shark story, although the latter did actually happen to her.

Shark story? I was intrigued. I like to think I’m up on things like this but I had never heard the name “Elizabeth Gardener” associated with sharks.

It turns out that on the 5th of September, 2005, around 3:20 in the afternoon, Liz was wading in waist deep water on North Topsail Beach when she was bitten by what is believed to be a bull shark. Her calf was badly lacerated and it took several months to heal.

I’d never met anyone who had been actually bitten by a shark of any size, and as you can see from the picture this things mouth was 8-10 inches wide. I though this would make for a great “blog story” and she was nice enough to show me her scar and tolerate a couple of pictures (although sadly the first picture is much more flattering to me than her).

I had to have the whole story. It turns out that she was with her boyfriend at the time, and I had to ask if he screamed like a little girl or did he do the hero thing. Thankfully he did the hero thing and got her out of the water and to medical help. She had to endure a couple of months of bandages (apparently there was an actual hole in her leg that had to grow back and fill in) and some physical therapy, as well as lots of jokes like “the shark must have thought you were sweet” (I did manage to avoid the temptation to add my own). Now she has almost full use of her leg back, although she lost the tendon that allows her to turn her foot outward.

She won’t get back in the water, and I plan to use this story the next time Andrea wants me to get into the ocean. I like to swim, but to me swimming involves chlorine and fruity drinks with umbrellas in them, not vicious fish and medical waste. Despite that, Liz seems very well adjusted, although I am sure she will add being trapped next to me on a plane for two hours as a close second to a bull shark bite. She’s considering getting plastic surgery for the scars but I think she should keep them. They’re cool.

On a related note, if you were on a cross country flight and could have anyone as your seat mate, who would you choose? I’m thinking either Neil Gaiman, Neil Stephenson, or Robin Williams. Others?