Get in Line

With the long lines at the airport, apparently I’m going to have to leave three hours ahead of time for all my flights for business and pleasure. It’s annoying but I’m an early airport person: I’d rather get past the metal detectors and sit for awhile than storm into the airport in a panic.

I agree that the wait is outrageous but I wonder if some people who missed their flights are making it worse for themselves by being unprepared. You know them: They always show up very late for flights, even though they are adults who should know better, then flail around and expect everyone around them to part like the Red Sea and offer them assistance. These are the travelers who are constitutionally incapable of getting their act together. You have to wonder if they’d be cutting close even with shorter lines.

There are a few ways people could make their travels and wait times easier for everyone around them. As a semi-frequent traveler, one of my annoyances on an airplane is people who bring carry-on items that they should check or find some other way to ship. Everyone else is shoving vital items like clothing into overhead bins and someone comes along with a cardboard cylinder that holds a poster for The Big Presentation and this means people behind that person (usually me) have to check necessities at the gate.

Gee, if only there were some way, some service or company, that could, like, ship your cardboard tube ahead of you so it would be waiting at the hotel for you to give The Big Presentation. If someone could come up with such a service, I bet he’d be a millionaire.

I don’t really have a point here but am just yammering on about air travel because I can’t think of anything else to write about. There was an amusing incident a few months ago on one of my flights. A woman and her daughter got into the front row of a Southwest flight and the husband apparently got on later so he couldn’t sit with them and had to sit in the back. Across the aisle, a man and his daughter had to buy a seat for her guitar because it wouldn’t fit overhead. (This is odd but I approve because the guitar would just have taken space away from someone’s necessities. Clothes are necessities; you can check your guitar.)

There was some discussion of why the woman’s husband couldn’t sit across the aisle in place of the guitar. I heard the flight attendant say something about “federal law” and figured that was a pretty good reason. The woman was really annoyed because nobody could explain further why her husband couldn’t sit with her to her satisfaction. She voluntarily got off the plane to talk to the airline. She yelled back at her husband, “Louis, we’re leaving!” Her daughter looked mortified that they would miss their flight. She was kind of nasty to the attendant, asking “How do you sleep at night?” as if not letting the two sit together due to federal law were tantamount to price gouging poor people for baby food.   

It was just odd because it’s not like they kicked the woman off. She got off voluntarily and inconvenienced herself just to prove some sort of point. It was a two hour-flight. Could these people really not have handled being separated?

I just thought it was amusing.