Around the world in 80 months

A new year, a new job, a new continent...
Sounds like I've read that somewhere before. Now I'm going full circle. Starting at the West coast of the USA, in San Francisco, pretty much exactly 80 months ago, I embarked on a journey to Oxfordshire, UK, on to Canton Geneve, Suisse, then to 宮城県、日本。Starting in January 2015 I will be joining the staff of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I am particularly pleased by the fact that I am cast as a physicist, not a particle physicist. Of course, I will stay involved in particle physics, but the lab has many interesting projects that I hope to contribute to. I look forward to proving that the training of a particle physicist enables one to have a positive impact on a variety of other subjects as well.  At the same time, I am confident that I can take advantage of the diverse capabilities at the lab for my research in particle physics, in particular for building an ILC detector that can deliver on the promise of precision physics in the Higgs and electroweak sector.

Now I will have to change my tag line. I have graduated from my journeyman days.

Snow on the Horizon

The view from my bus stop on Saturday,

As part of my new job, I was trying to attend the AIDA Horizon2020 workshop at CERN next week. It's a good opportunity to network with the groups who are active in detector development, and to get a good overview of the field. Not really a short trip from Sendai, but such is the life of a particle physicist.

Well, it looks like Frau Holle had something against my travel plans. After my flight from Sendai to Narita got canceled on Saturday, I spend a significant fraction of my day on the phone to get the flight changed to Sunday. It's not as easy to get the airline to accept they are responsible for taking care of their passengers as you might think. And apparently the travel agents can't always call the airline support numbers from outside of the country. A little after midnight everything was sorted and I had my new itinerary.

The view from my browser window on Sunday.

Unfortunately, the flight got canceled again. Notice the missing arrival time next to the flights expected at 08:55 in NRT.
So now I am trying to get a refund. It seems to be completely normal for the airlines to fly for 20 hrs. from Japan to Switzerland, arrive in the evening, spend the night in Switzerland and fly back the next morning. I'm trying to convince that a) I was trying to attend a meeting that will be over by the time they propose to get me there, and b) spending less time on the ground than in the air is something I would rather avoid in any case.

There are again some lessons to take away from this:

• Online travel agencies are worth their money.
• When it looks like it's going to take forever for the agent to get back to you, or if they put you on hold repeatedly, have them call you back. Most agents will happily do that. It took me a while to learn that, and I am honestly a bit nervous about my next phone bill.
• If you cancel or change an inbound flight, and you would like to keep your outbound flight, make sure the airline knows about this change. Most airlines will cancel your whole itinerary including your return trip if you don't show up on an inbound flight. The airlines are supposed to notify the operators of your connecting flights of any cancellations, but apparently you cannot rely on this. 
• Trips with several different carriers cause significant headaches to change.
• The airline that cancels the flight should be held responsible for the follow-up with the connecting flights and possibly re-booking those, even if they are code-share flights operated by other airlines. I had to call offices in Japan, Switzerland, and in the UK to find this out. After insisting that the operator of the canceled flight should take responsibility, the agent became suddenly quite helpful.

Safe travels.