Late Night Changes at Work

In my line of work, a lot of the changes one makes or is involved with others in making, have to happen at night to minimize impact to the company's bottom line.

I am presently contracting with United Airlines doing network design and implementation stuff and last night was the latest in many a sleepless evening working on network changes to hopefully improve things for UAL.

Anyways, we were finally done at almost 0300 hrs MDT, aka O'Dark hundred in old army parlance. I donned my gear in the dark parking lot at the UAL Cargo Building's parking lot and headed off into the cool night air for the 30 minute ride home. My onboard thermometer recently died but I figure the temps were in the low 50s.

The roads, as you might surmise, were pretty devoid of traffic. I elected to bypass the E470 superslab which is my normal route to/from DIA and instead took surface roads all the way home. Surprising, or perhaps not, I made very good time even with catching several traffic lights as I made my way through the empty streets.

There's something rather nice about riding empty streets at night, the occasional car reminds you you're not alone but otherwise when compared with the chaos of my normal commuting patterns, it was very refreshing. I was riding Maria, my 2004 R1150RT with her full fairings protecting me from the cool early morning air, didn't even have to turn on the heated grips.

No deer or other wildlife spotted in spite of several signs posted warning one of such. The only thing was some dude, dressed in black, crossing the street a couple of blocks ahead of me on airport blvd. I saw him in plenty of time as I was scanning forward aggressively, but I have to wander what the heck he was doing walking about at 3 o'clock in the morning.

Got home at 0330hrs with no issues, about the same time if not better than if I'd taken the E-470 slab and saved myself the tolls each way.