And yet we keep doing it to ourselves. We keep going back, asking for more. Please take my money. Overcharge me for my baggage. Lose my luggage. Delay my flight. Make me miss my connecting flight. Give me bags of peanuts that squirrels would laugh at. Make me sit in the airport for hours where I will inevitably devour food that makes my stomach squirm as if it is trying to get out.
“Why did you eat that airport gyro?” your stomach whines. “Didn’t you learn your lesson after eating the airport taco? We’re still paying off the ambulance ride and that industrial-strength stomach pump.”
We’re to blame. We do it to ourselves. I ate the airport gyro. I let them stuff me like cattle onto a flying sausage with no leg-room. And I believed the gate attendant in Austin, Texas, when she told me, “Oh, sure, this flight might be 45 minutes off schedule, but since all the flights out of Atlanta run late, you’ll have no problem making your connecting flight.”
I am a damn fool because I BELIEVED HER!!!
Or my connecting flight was the first plane in the history of the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to leave on time.
Either way … I missed it!
I had been in Austin for a college media conference where I received an award and presented my thesis research on college newspapers. There were three crickets at my presentation, and one left when he realized I wasn’t serving snacks. The other two clicked and chirped through my whole talk.
But I got a big plaque for my troubles, spent two nights in that smokin’ cool town and had the pleasure of watching more than 1 million Mexican free-tail bats emerge from underneath the Congress Avenue bridge. At sunset they all swarm out in a giant traffic jam of winged mayhem as they head off to feast on fat Texan mosquitoes.
All was good about the trip, except trying to get home. Atlanta is the black hole of modern airplane travel, and there is a whole wing of the airport reserved just for people who have missed their flights and have never been able to get booked on another one. So forever they roam the halls of the airport pleading with perfect strangers to call their families to tell them their cell phone batteries are dead and that they will never make it home.
I had no intention of joining their ranks, so once we touched down I bolted from the jetway and down the concourse in search of my next flight — two bags flapping about my shoulders as I ran. Nothing looks less dignified than a man being beaten in the face by his luggage while he runs through crowds screaming, “Where’s my flight? Anyone see my flight?”
I must have looked crazed and deranged, and I’m still amazed Homeland Security didn’t shoot me.
I ran for a couple hundred yards before I consulted the flight board, only to find that the gate I needed was actually right next to the one I had just exited. Back up the concourse the deranged man ran with flapping bags.
But the plane was long gone, and I would spend the next four excruciating hours wandering Atlanta Hartsfield dodging hopeless travelers and praying my cell phone didn’t give out.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Why don’t we take the train or just stay home? I was supposed to be home by 6:30, and didn’t make it back until almost midnight.
Yet, I still count myself lucky. At times like those you have to dwell on the positives. It could have been worse. I might have been on that plane that overshot the airport by 150 miles. (My theory is those pilots weren’t sleeping or working on their laptops, but in fact had gone outside for a walk.)
I might not have made it back that night at all, and could have missed taking my daughter trick or treating the next day — Halloween.
I might have lost my luggage. I might have been taken down by Homeland Security. I might have had a hole burned through my lower intestines thanks to that gyro. And I would have had no one to blame but myself.