Did I Make The Right Decision?

I often serve as advisor to graduate students; for some I am their assigned academic advisor and for others I am someone they can talk with and seek guidance from.  I always tell them that once they have thoroughly thought through a problem, weighing all the factors, and made a decision based on the best knowledge available at the time, they should not later second guess themselves.  That still seems like good advice.  However, since making a decision last Friday after an especially frustrating series of events, I am having second thoughts and regretting a decision I made.  Here is the situation:

My boss, Dean Philip Nasca, and I left Albany on a Continental flight to Newark's Liberty Airport Friday afternoon at 1:10 on the first leg of a trip that would take us first to Hong Kong then on to Hanoi for meetings there related to a major chronic disease surveillance project we are planning to undertake with Vietnamese colleagues.  This project will involve not only colleagues in Hanoi at a number of health agencies and university centers but also colleagues from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst School of Public Health.  David Buchanan from Amherst was leaving from Boston and would meet us in Hanoi.  After we finished our meetings in Hanoi, Phil and I were going on to Siem Reap, Cambodia, where we would visit The Global Child, a not-for-profit program to educate street children in that city.  We would be returning to Albany on March 1.

Friday was an unusually warm February day with temperatures eventually rising to 60 degrees once the sun came out.  It was also very windy, not only in Albany but throughout the Northeast.  Our flight would normally take 30 minutes from Albany to Newark.  Our itinerary gave us 50 minutes from landing in Newark to the take-off of the Homg Kong flight so we knew it was cutting it close but we were told the flight to Hong Kong would leave from the same terminal and that should provide "plenty of time"  for us to make it as well as for our luggage to get transferred.

Before we took off we were told that due to strong winds air traffic control was asking us to sit on the tarmac for clearance, a delay of 20 minutes expected.  Twenty minutes later we were airborne.  As we approached the airport in Newark, our flight crew was asked to circle, another delay of another 20 minutes and this made us nervous because time was ticking away and it looked like there was no way we would land at the scheduled time, 2:40, and we could miss our 3:30 connection but the flight attendants were optimistic that we'd make it.  Several other passengers also had tight connections and were getting nervous.  Then as we approached the airport, a third delay was announced and we began circling again for another 10 minutes.  Once on the ground, the tension continued to build as the trip to a gate was torturously slow and halting but the kicker was when we arrived at the gate and no gate agent was there to roll the jetway to the plane:  another wait of 15 minutes began and now tensions were very high.  As soon as we were allowed to leave the plane, we had less than 15 minutes to run the 50 gates to the gate for the flight to Hong Kong--we arrived at the gate in time to see the plane backing out and the doors closed.  Arrgghh!!!

That's when decision time began.  A trip to the Continental "service center" was about as frustrating--long lines due to many missed connections and lots of irate people sharing stories  of their experiences.  Once we got to the head of the line, we were told that we could get a flight out on the next day's flight to Hong Kong--there were two seats left (both middle seats which would not be very comfortable on a 16 hour flight) but they could not guarantee that we would then be able to get an onward flight to Hanoi before the middle of this week.  What to do?  Phil said he was not going to go on but certainly I should go if I was willing to take the chance on getting to Hanoi in time to have it be meaningful.  By this time my right knee was throbbing (I had wrenched it the weekend before playing in the snow with my great-grandsons and the run through the airport had aggravated it); the thought of sitting on a plane the next day for 16 hours in a middle seat combined, I admit, with my frustration with Continental and our travel agent who had issued the tickets for such a brief window of time and putting us in this situation, was topmost and I bailed too.  We cancelled our trip and came back to Albany that night.  We assumed that David had been able to leave from Boston and would represent us in Hanoi which would at least make all the planning and arrangements done there worthwhile for our Vietnam colleagues.  And, we reasoned, we have a trip to Sun Yat-sen University in China coming up in June; we can add to that itinerary and visit both Hanoi and Siem Reap during that trip (and reduce the overall costs).  We learned many lessons; one of them is to not accept what your travel agent does without questioning it and overruling it in a case like this.  There was an earlier morning flight from Albany to Newark that day.  If we had taken that, we would have had some down time sitting around in the Newark airport but we also would have made the flight to Hong Kong and onward to Hanoi and Siem Reap. 

Now, of course, when my knee is feeling so much better and I have calmed down, I think it was a bad decision to bail out of the onward trip.  I could have found an inexpensive hotel in the area around the  Newark airport for overnight, taken the flight to Hong Kong on Saturday (who knows, perhaps I would have been able to get an aisle seat at flight time) and taken my chances on getting a flight to Hanaoi by Tuesday latest.  Oh, the cognitive struggle . . .  What do you think I should have done?