Trip Preparation, Three Weeks in
Advance
March 10, 2006
Dr. Herman: James and I started packing things
with the OhmMapper equipment three weeks prior to our departure. We needed
to ship the OhmMapper up to Barrow via the cargo arm of Alaska Airlines
since it could (theoretically) take up to two weeks to get it there. And,
we were not confident that we could take the equipment as carry-on baggage
when we traveled ourselves. Wanting to take no chances, James took the
three cases, totaling about 130 pounds, to Dulles airport when he went to
visit his family in the area two weeks before we were to fly out. He and I
had everything collected on one table in my lab, wanting to be absolutely
sure that we had everything in one place, and could pack it all up without
any mistakes. It's not like we could just run to the local hardware store
in Barrow and replace a piece of this equipment.
James took the equipment and got it off on Alaska Air
Cargo over the weekend of February 25. However, on Monday afternoon,
February 27, I went down into my lab to straighten some things up. I had
been cleaning and rearranging things for about an hour when I noticed
something unexpected. I saw one crucial cable from the OhmMapper just
lying on a table next to our packing/staging table! Urgh! I finally just
laughed, told James, and he and I both realized that we had stared right
at that piece as we were packing everything so carefully. Reminds me of
that "count the number of basketball bounces" experiment that's so
famous.
But no harm done. It was small, and we knew we could
just put it into our regular luggage in two weeks. But it was a bit
disconcerting to have done that.
The next week, the week before we were to leave, we
put some other things on the packing/staging table to take in our luggage.
These things included instruction manuals for the OhmMapper (just in
case), papers on the arctic and ice studies, field notebooks and pens, and
the like. It also included one very small but important piece, a USB
hardware key (called a "dongle"-don't ask me why) that unlocked the full
abilities of the software that we were going to use to process the
numerical data we received from the OhmMapper. This tiny thing, a bit
smaller than a thumb drive, is used instead of a software key to unlock a
program. I keep it in its own plastic container, and I guard it somewhat
obsessively. But we put all of these things in a moderately-large
Tupperware container, on that particular table, so that nothing could go
wrong...
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March 2006