By now, my struggles with transportation and/or life in general are fairly well-documented. So when my mom booked me a flight to Columbia for Thanksgiving, I was determined to turn my fortunes around. I promised my mother dearest on multiple occasions that I would, under no circumstances, miss the flight. It was non-refundable, and were I to miss it, she made me well aware, I would bankrupt the family name and force us to live out the rest of our days as vagabonds scourging through South Carolina's backroads chasing one decrepit rabbit after another for meals.
Not a pretty picture.
Come Thursday night, I look up the date and time of the flight in order to prepare. 6:45 PM on Monday. I plan accordingly.
Anyways, as chance would have it, kinks start getting thrown into my plan left and right. To begin with, I have a paper due Monday. And a paper due Monday means an all-nighter on Sunday, which means I'm effectively dead on the day I have to catch my flight. I realize by 11 PM into my all-nighter that I somehow forgot to bring along my keys to the library. By 10:30 AM I finish my paper, and I get to my 11:20 class on time for the first time all semester. Despite the fact that hearing a human being screeching like a branded banshee is the absolute last thing I want to do after being awake for 22 hours, I'm still callously subjected to the voice of Carson Kressley on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which we happen to be studying in my Dissident Media course. I want to kill living things.
Luckily for the planet and the species thereon, class gets out, and I realize I need to print out my flight itinerary so I can keep my long-offered promise to my mother. After printing the itinerary out and checking what time everything was set to go down, I get back to my day. Long story short, I nap through the majority of Linear Algebra, bounce out of there a half-hour early to go to a meeting with my AU Abroad advisor which doesn't exist because I have, somewhat ominously, apparently mistaken the date, eat lunch, and then head back home. I have roughly 4 hours until flight time.
Unfortunately, I don't have keys. I have to walk 20 minutes back to campus, get Brittany's keys, and walk the 20 minutes back to the apartment. I finally get into the apartment and pack all my clothes in literally 4 minutes and then take my first shower since Sunday afternoon. I've been awake for roughly 26 hours.
I gather all my things, throw some homeworks into my bookbag, and head out. It's 4:55 PM. I have an hour and fifty minutes to get onto my plane. I walk like a champion down Porter St. and get inside the Cleveland Park Metro station at 5:12. In an unprecedented display of navigation, I get on the right train both at Cleveland Park and Chinatown and get off at Reagan. After walking first in the right direction to get to the US Airways terminal, then in the wrong direction to get to the US Airways terminal, and finally back in the right direction to get to the US Airways terminal on the train platform, I get into the US Airways terminal.
I take the moving sidewalk to get to the little US Airways booth, where I promptly attempt to go through the exit to get to the self-check in kiosks. I figure out the error of my ways, go in the actual entrance, and hit up the kiosk. I'm excited.
I put my credit card in. I type in the first three letters of my connecting location. I wait patiently. And the kiosk can't find my reservation. I put my credit card back in and type PHI again. Still nothing. I try it once more, this time putting in COL - that's right, I go all the way to the destination for this badboy. And nothing. I'm gradually getting more and more pissed off. I have my itinerary in my hand, after all, and it says I have a US Air flight to Columbia by way of Philadelphia (geographic sense be damned), and I refuse to accept this kiosk as my intellectual equal.
I ask the man behind the booth if he can help a brotha out. Since he assumes I must be illiterate, he puts my name and connecting flight location into the check-in kiosk for me. Surprise, surprise - it can't find my reservation. "You'll have to go to the main desk then," he says. "Third floor and to the right." I thank him and hop onto the elevator.
I go up to the third floor, hang a right, and get to the main desk. There's no line, so I mosey on up to the front with my bag and the lady at the desk asks me to fill in my information on the kiosk up there. These kiosks are surprisingly similar to the last ones, but I still hold out hope. They're main desk kiosks. Regardless of how much hope I hold out, though, they still give me the same result as the lowly bullshit-non-main-desk kiosks.
I look at my itinerary in disbelief of this negligence and mistreatment. I check everything on the paper. It's going to Columbia via Philadelphia. It's at 6:45 PM, not AM. It's for Tuesday, November 23. I even checked my phone to make sure it was, in fact, Tuesday, November 23. And at this very moment, the fact that I'm David Wile trumps any planning I may have had the foresight to make.
Indeed, there comes a time in every mentally handicapped person's life when they realize that they're just not quite like other people. Something about their intellectual capacity prevents them from interacting as a normal participant in society. Something is always bearing down like Fate upon their sordid brows. This, friends, was my moment.
I flipped the paper around multiple times hoping maybe somewhere it would say "or Monday, November 22, if you've completely lost track of the seven-day week pattern;" but alas, I searched in vain. Even worse, upon seeing my frantic reaction, the people behind the desk asked me if I needed help, and I had to embarrassingly act like "something just came up" so as to give myself a reason to leave the main check-in desk without checking anything in - although this wasn't so difficult considering that "something" was the dawning realization of my mental retardation, and I needed to walk to a more open area to mull over the consequences of that handicap.
I had alot to mull over: indeed, I had just packed an entire suitcase and traveled for an hour to catch a flight 24 hours early fully convinced that I would depart that night. The circumstances were impressive even for my standards. I also got the wonderful privilege of needing to text my Columbia friends and my roommates that I would not, in fact, be leaving for Thanksgiving that night, and that I would instead be institutionalizing myself to protect myself and society at large.
I take the long, awkward trip, luggage in tow, back to my apartment. I cross the pristine Potomac, laughing to scorn my stupidity even as it flowed peacefully through its Columbian banks. I notice the judging glares of my fellow passengers, every one seemingly aware of my idiocy. One silently mocks me in his "Pawley's Island, South Carolina" t-shirt.
When I finally get back to the apartment, I salvage the one good result from the whole ordeal: I don't have to pack on the day of my flight. I put the retractable handle back down into my rolly-luggage bag: it doesn't go down. I try again. It refuses to go down into the bag a second time. I begin violently lifting the bag by the handle and slamming it into our linoleum. I do this until the bag breaks. To add injury to insult, the bottom of the handle mechanism has come detached from the bag, leaving the handle as more of a see-saw lever than a luggage handle. Miffed, I shove the bag into the foyer.
I'll deal with it tomorrow.
I also have the sticky situation of having told my Studies in German Film professor that I wouldn't be coming on Tuesday because I would be home. After much deliberation, I concluded that the most diplomatic way of handling this discrepancy - to avoid imposing undue embarrassment on either party - is to just not go to class. It's in everyone's best interest.
And unfortunately for my family fortune, the very real possibility that I'll miss my flight still hovers in the air, poised and ready to strike at a moment's notice.
Thank God my mom literally just called me to make sure I won't do that.
