This isn't really a 'traveling' nightmare, perse, since we were only traveling about 20 miles from our lab to the San Jose regional, but it was still a nightmare nonetheless.
We had packed all our tools and supplies for SVR this year the afternoon before the event. Normally all our stuff goes in my SUV and I drive it to the event. Due to various circumstances, our tool crate had to be driven to the event this year, so we needed a truck. We had planned out months in advance that we'd borrow a truck from the motor pool here at NASA to load all our stuff into, and we'd drive it over on Thursday morning.
Murphy had other ideas, however, and we forgot to get the keys to the truck from the motor pool before they closed on Wednesday afternoon. So we decide to come in at 6 AM when the motor pool opens, get the keys, load the truck, and get on the road.
So Thursday morning myself, another mentor, and our boss show up to load all our stuff. For background, we have a few different obstacles inside our building when it comes to moving things out. One is that the most convenient area for loading (a large roll-up door at the back of the building) has a 3 foot wide chokepoint leading up to it, preventing palletjack/tool crate from making it's way through. Two is that our only other door larger than a standard doorway is the entire front wall of the building. It's motorized and the entire wall slides open. Sounds great, except for the fact that the motor is broken and it takes at least 4 people to push it open without giving yourself a hernia.
So we plan on using the overhead crane in our building to lift the crate over the chokepoint and to the roll up door. Then we discover our slings aren't nearly long enough.
So the last resort is to tear down a bunch of office partitions that were in place to separate our workspace, and take the crate out the rolling front wall.
Myself and the other mentor open the wall far enough to get all our stuff out, load it in the truck, and get ready to close the door so we can leave. It's already way later than we had planned on leaving, and we both need to be at the venue in 20 minutes for early uncrating. It takes at least 30 min to get there in traffic.
So we start to close the door, which probably weighs at least a few tons (40' tall door x60' long). It moves about two feet, and then gets completely stuck. We back it as far as we can and get a running start with it, as we figured someone dropped some screws in the track or something, and we'll use inertia to get over them, and it slams to a stop again.
To make a long story short, there's a large air vent the size of a standard door that has a sheetmetal cover that opens to let the air in the building. For some reason we had left the cover open, and not closed, so when we pushed the door closed, the sheetmetal cover folded itself almost 180* back over itself when it tried to pass through a 8" gap between a support beam and the front wall.
When the doors open, they move into the room adjacent to them in the building, so the site of this disaster was located next door, in the room we can't get into. Once we finally round someone up to let us in, we discover this sheetmetal cover does not have standard hinges that you can punch the pins out of. Nor are the hinges bolted to the cover. They're welded. At this point we're 30 minutes past when we were supposed to be at the event, and we sort of have to close the front wall of our lab, so the only choice is to get the air grinder and cut the cover off the hinges, which takes another good 20 minutes.
Finally we get the darn thing off the wall, nearly throw our backs out closing the door (which as mentioned before, normally requires 4 or more people) with just the two of us, and make it to the event nearly two hours late.
Luckily everyone else who knew what needed to be done at the event showed up ontime, or else it would have been a major disaster. Turned out to be sort of an omen of how things would go the rest of the weekend too
