“A Father’s tale” As an expecting parent I am counting the months, weeks, and days that my relocation will take place.  However, during the last 9 weeks I had the company of my 10 years old daughter, she came from Panama to spend their Summer Vacations (Our winter) with Daddy (Papi), we had a great time.  Yesterday I had to drop her at the Airport for her return trip home.  Being my daughter, a Soldier’s daughter,  she has been traveling her entire life, that is the way it goes with the military, but this time was really nerves racking, since she would take her first trip by herself, she would be all alone in an international flight:

                The morning started fine, we all got up on time, toke showers, got ready to take my oldest son to school, then we will go to breakfast at Mac Donalds and to the Airport we go, a 2 hours drive to Orlando international Airport, of course, that was the plan, did it happened, NO…  As we are packing up to get in the car, I noticed that my daughter’s traveling permit from my ex-wife was not in the packet, I still have not printed it out, and I still needed to go and shave, so I told my son to pull out the e-mail and print it out for me while I shave, he proceeded to do it without complains,  it should have been an easy enough task, hit print right? But  no, it was not, my daughter had used up all the paper the night prior with her drawings and now we were out of paper, I heard my son yelling asking, DAD WE ARE OUT OF PAPER, DO WE HAVE ANYMORE IN THE HOUSE? (I am getting that tingling feeling that something is about to go wrong, please God, help me here)  Son, check in the garage, we should have more paper in one of the boxes, I told him and continue to shave, once I got finish I come out and see that my son looking at the computer, so I ask him, What is the problem? As I check to see if he found the paper, yes he did…  Dad, it won’t print out…  We are not out of ink, I just bought it last week, the paper is on it’s place, it is connected, there are no errors or alarms in the printer, what is the problem? Let me sit down son, let me check the printer set ups, everything is in order, I see you tried to print out 4 times already, let us clear the buffer out and we should be good, but let us take you to school and I come back and mess with it after breakfast.   I cleared all the print jobs, unplugged the USB cable, waited 10 seconds and re attach it, I hear the bin, bin, noise, ok the computer recognized it, knowing computers for over 24 years, I figured, let me re-start it and by the time I come back it should be all good, let us go kids…

                We dropped my son, my daughter and I went to breakfast, and had a good time driving back to the house,  laughing and singing along with the radio.  Got to the house, everything looked good, let me print this out…. NO, there is still a print job in the computer, it is cancel but it won’t disappear, which in turn is not letting new print job request to go through…  Ah, what a pain… after 30 minutes more of troubleshooting, I had to give up, saved the document on my SD memory card and let us go to the print store…  Loaded the luggage in a hurry, and off we went…  Getting to the print shop took forever, seems like every light wanted to be red, and every slow person wanted to drive in front of me, I was losing it..  After driving for 10 minutes in city traffic we finally arrived, there it is, oh men, we just miss the turn, let me turn around in the next road…  We get to the place and off course, every worker in the store, 10 of them, they are too busy to take care of me, so I am standing at the counter fuming, waiting for help, a few seconds passed and I figure, one of this machines should have an slot for SD cards and credit cards, so I start looking around, no, they did not, ah, excuse me sir, I told to one of the workers talking to a client, they both looked at me like saying “wait your turn” I just pointed to the SD card, where do I print a JPG file? He looked at me in dismay again, Sir, he addressed me, and then turned around to the client, excuse me Sir, looking back at me again, you have one of two options, first take your card to the counter and one of our service representatives will take care of it for you, (I glanced at the counter were I have been waiting previously, were everybody ignored my presence) ok, those guys are no help, what is my second choice? I asked, well Sir, you see that sign at the end of the store, to the right of that are our consumer terminals, ok, got it, thanks I said and I was walking, we got there and I see an entire room of terminals, ok not a problem, sat down put my SD card on the computer and of course, the computer came alive, please enter the following information “Last name, First Name, e-mail address, phone number etc.” , “please insert your credit card” ah, pain, and undue suffering, they want to record your entire identity just to print out a document, then, please wait until the program get loaded, this won’t take but a few seconds and they won’t be charge to your card… At this point we were already running late, I finally got to use the computer, find the document and hit print, me and my daughter looked around, were is the printer? After a few painful seconds we hear a printer at the end of the room getting activated, Nadia, I called my daughter, go down there and see if that is ours, she ran, stood in front of the printer, and waited for the page to come out, every second counted, we wanted to be on the road already.  She pulls out the sheet with an expression of victory on her face and showed to me, that was it…  We got out of there in a hurry, got in the car and started in our 2 hour trip, with only 1 ½ left, we were never going to make the 2 hours prior to time required for international flights, but we would have never been able to get her in the plane without the permit to exit the country from her mother that was awaiting for her in Panama.  After the longest 2 hours in my resent history we made it to the airport.  All parking slots were full in the first and second level, we ended up parking on the third level, and now we had to go down to the terminal, we moved fast, but still, we got there with only an 1 and 15 minutes before departure, the lines were huge at American, as usual, I tried to do a self check in, and did not worked, I needed help, I got the attention of one of the airline assistants, “My daughter’s flight leaves in an hour and she is flying by herself, please help me” she looked at me with dismay, and I got the tittle thrown at me again, Sir, you should have been here 2 hours prior, go around the first class lane and they will help you fill out all the paperwork needed for her in order for her to make it into that flight.  Yes, there was a line in first class, so I go around the line while everyone is looking at me all crazy, Ma’am, please, I need help, she looked at me all weird and replied, yes, Sir, may I help you? I explained, and she  started waving her hands toward the direction of the lady that I had just finish talking to, so I interrupted, Ma’am, (it was my turn to be sarcastic), she was the one that told me to come and see you, so she looked me up and down and said very politely, but with an smirk on her face, I understand, but you have to make a line, please, wait behind the first class passenger line and we will take care of you.  I knew it was all my fault, there is no use on aggravating the situation, I stood in line, and painfully moved forward, until we got out turn, 40 minutes were left before the flight departure by the time we arrived to the counter.  The normally pleasant ladies in first class did not cared for my kind of people, “late and un-wealthy dressed”, she listed to my story and told me there was a lot of papers to fill out, so I started to comply filling all the forms and giving her mine and my daughter’s credentials, after all it only took 10 minutes and I had a companion ticket to go through the gate with my daughter and handle her to the flight attendants at the gate.  We started walking towards the terminal and as we walked we started seeing the long lines, I hope we get through this on time…  We did, and as we walk to the counter, on Gate 17, the flight attendant greeted my daughter, Nadia, we were waiting on you.  It made me feel so much better, finally something was going right, thanks God.  They check, double check and triple ckeck all the paperwork and waved my daughter to accompany them, she just started walking with them, as I interrupted, Nadia, give me a kiss, and she ran back and give me a hug and a kiss and say bye Papi… 

                My heart melted with each step she took inside the tunnel, as I lost her from site, I felt lost in despair,  cause for it will be another year before I see my daughter again…  As I walk back to the car I got lost and ended in the wrong terminal parking lot, I looked around for my car for about 10 minutes until I realized that I was at the wrong parking, I had to cross the entire airport to get to my car.  The drive home was a painful one, for now I won’t have my baby with me once again.  But after I got home and waited, and waited while my brother, mother, neighbor kept calling me, have you heard from Nadia’s arrival? And it was not until after a dozen calls and 10PM at night that we finally got word that she arrived to her mother, she had lost a piece of luggage and had to go back the next day to look for it, but she made it safe.  I did not got to hear her voice, since my ex-wife told my son that Nadia got there ok and hanged up the phone.   Hence I started writing this journal, she had called me, and she sounded great, telling me how well she was treated by the airline crew, how she was afforded the opportunity to go in a play room and they kept her company, I will be forever grateful to those unknown to me, good Samaritans that took care of my child in her journey.  With those words I close my journal, and may God bless you for reading “A Father’s Tale”…  Don Fofo