- by Joanie!
In the
last post on Flying, I entered the dark
side, failing every test of patience all the admonishments given both by Jesus
Christ and Jedi Master Yoda on how to be a decent human being.
It’s easy to fail when everyone around you is as well,
turning every airport (which can really be any
airport, since they’re all the same) into a fully functional Death Star
before you can say, “It’s a trap!”
It started with a normal morning—going through security,
being told to take off my form fitting jacket so the TSA agent could leer at me
more effectively, having a TSA lady pat down my hair accessory just in case it
was a bomb (and doing so before I could say, change your gloves—I don’t know in
what filthy places those [expletive deleted] hands have been!), buying a bottle
of water for 400 dollars inside the terminal, and settling in to wait for my
flight.
When all of a sudden:
“Good morning, folks! We’ve got some celebrities joining you
on your flight this morning: George Clooney, Johnny, Depp, etc! Haha, April
Fool’s, everybody. But seriously, your plane is broken.”
We wait for him to say this is also part of the joke, when
he goes on:
“The battery is dead in the plane, and we’re likely to be
here for several hours, so if you’ve got a connection, let’s rebook you!”
And just like that, all of the passengers march like Storm
Troopers to form an orderly and pissed off line at the counter.
I call Michael, who can lower my freak-out-o-meter before I
speak to another human being, who will be yelled at, since I wasn’t allowed to
take my light saber through security, and thus, can’t cut off the desk clerk’s
hand, or better yet, bad joking head.
In this conversation, I lament the flaws of the airline—Delta—I’m
not going to hide it, it’s DELTA, DELTA, DELTA, and nearly all airline problems
originate with them. They are the sorriest excuse for a travel service I’ve
ever experienced. So there.
I also tried to figure out how on earth a battery dies in an airplane. Did the pilot leave the
lights on overnight? Leave the keys in the ignition? Door ajar? How the
[expletive deleted] do you do that?!?!
By the time I hang up, people around me are looking at me
like I’m the emperor and I just shot lighting through my hands. If only.
Most are laughing, because even when I’m angry, I’m funny.
And let’s face it, these observations were being made by people other than me
also.
Then this lady two people ahead of me in line says, “you
know, a little positive energy goes a long way.”
It took all of the presence of mind I had stored up for the
rest of the day not to yell, “Well, hooray! I’m glad somebody read The Secret, and knows the answers for
solving all problems! Positive energy! I’ll just get that positive energy right
on down to that dead battery and with happiness rays shock it back into
function.”
Clearly this dumb-[expletive deleted] doesn’t understand the
laws of physics. Besides, it’s difficult to take seriously anyone who wears a
sweatsuit with heels.
Somehow, the flight left early enough that I would [barely]
make my connecting flight. I guess the dark energies of the Sith were more
effective than that woman’s powers of positive thinking. That, or someone came
down on the robot droids working on the plane, and told them that it was just
plain unprofitable for them to move so slowly, and Jabba would have them
tortured if they didn’t move it along.
For reasons unbeknownst to me, as there was not turbulence,
we did not have beverage service on the flight, at least not for we po’ Irish
folk down in steerage.
When I asked a flight attendant about finding out the gate
for my connecting flight before landing, so that I could figure out if I would
make it, and did so with surprising
politeness that took a great deal of effort on the part of my black heart,
he snapped back, “there are people with earlier connections than yours. There’s
always someone worse off than you!”
This blatant rudeness is not limited to just the flight
attendants. On another flight where I had an unusually long layover, I found an
earlier flight with the same airline at a different gate and asked if there was
any room for me to take the earlier flight. I was polite and smiled the whole
time. This older woman, who wore more Christmas pins than you’d expect to see
at an antique store in Kansas, snapped, “Not on THIS plane!” as if I had asked
her if we could please please fit the entire population of Alderon on the
flight before their planet blew up.
This is what I thought of as the flight attendant sashayed
away from me.
I’m not saying that I, or my fellow passengers were
particularly pleasant, but I’m not paid to be pleasant on the flight. In fact,
I’ve emptied a significant portion of my checking or savings so that I can go
where I’m going—usually to do an audition in the hopes that I’ll continue to be
gainfully employed in my persnickety and competitive dream field. Very few
passengers are on the plane for fun, and I for one am really tired of airline
employees acting as though their service for my business is a pain in their
[expletive deleted].
I couldn’t get off the plane fast enough, and I ran through
Atlanta (it’s always Atlanta, isn’t
it?) to get to my connection. Practically everyone else from my flight was
doing the same, except for the people in the first row of coach, who apparently
had nowhere else to be but dawdling on the plane while people behind them
danced around like they had ants in their pants waiting to go.
I passed all the eateries on my way, looking with envy at
the people in line. I hadn’t had time to eat before the first flight, what with
waiting in line and cursing the laziness of the airline. And I didn’t have time
to eat or even think about buying anything to eat on the way to my next flight.
I was thirsty and hungry and not caffeinated. Had Emperor Palpatine appeared
before me right then and asked me to become his young apprentice, I would have
gladly done so, especially for access to a Tai fighter that I wouldn’t have to
share with any other human beings, and because a droid instead of a person
would complete mundane tasks like bringing me just one [expletive deleted]
glass of water on the plane.
I don’t know if it was worthwhile to be upset or annoyed at
not being able to eat airport slop. There seems to be a lack of decent food in
airports everywhere—the commitment to mediocrity across the board keeps all
eateries functioning more or less to capacity. Were there a restaurant that
served decent, and even less believable, healthy-ish food, they’d be flooded and
airport traffic would practically shut down. I was still yearning for that trip
with the obscenely long layover, even though I know whatever I ate would be
disgusting. On that trip, I ate some bland Tex-Mex, that, to cover up for the
bland texture, was coated in Fires of Hell Sauce labeled “Medium.”
I’m almost done with this trip…it’s on my return flight home
that I write this post. And as I write, the (what are those things that
kindapped Luke in the snow world?) sits in front of me, who started the flight
with snoring that sounds like a cross between a lumber mill and an entire
building of pigs at a county fair, and now plays a video game on his phone with
the sound all the way up.
And I smile my evil smile, because I’m not sitting next to
anyone. That’s right, my row is empty, and no one asked to be moved up to it.
Probably because of the extremely sour look on my face, and my determination to
sit smack dab in the middle in my assigned seat so no one will see my row as a
viable spreading out option. I also didn’t bother washing my hair before this
flight, and while I don’t look nearly as gross as the guy in dreads (who’s
seated next to a nun…seriously), I’ve made great effort to look less like the
attractive young lady I usually appear to be.
Heh heh heh…the force is strong in this one.