David Does More or Less Exactly What One Would Expect

By now, most of my adoring audience is well acquainted with my eternal struggle with the banalities of high-speed transportation. Buses, trains, and airplanes continue to show an annoying level of commitment to their refusal to learn the detailed intricacies of my personal schedule, and I continue to maintain my commitment to my refusal to learn theirs. In our latest episode, we join David at his apartment in DC on Tuesday, November 22, needing to catch at 10:30 AM flight to make it home for Thanksgiving. He's been up since 2:30 AM after an accidental nap left him extremely behind schedule for an assignment that quite possibly is due that very morning. He spends the rest of the night/morning reading the article he would then have to write a page on were the assignment in fact due that day. Let's pick up the unforeseen consequences of this uncertainty here. 

Having finished reading Terry Moe's "The Presidency and the Bureaucracy: The Presidential Advantage" for my aptly-titled class "The Presidency" by around 7:00, I then had to answer a question about it, which took until 8:22. Taking my fellow passengers into account, I grabbed a quick shower. I also hadn't actually packed yet, so I knocked that out of the way, and then I texted Cullen to pick me up at the Charlotte airport at 12:30. Having planned to leave at 8:30 and give myself a comfortable 2-hour window before the flight, I ended up leaving my apartment at 9:10. Still, I should be able to Metro on down to Reagan with enough time to be allowed onto the plane. 

I get to the Metro by 9:18, and immediately a train comes. I get off at Chinatown and head downstairs to the Yellow Line in time to see the train I need leave the station. I now have 8 minutes to wait before the next train, which means that it'll whisk me away around 9:39, giving me probably around 35 minutes to get from Chinatown to my gate. I'm doing some intense Metro math to figure out how long it'll take the train to get to the airport, estimating that I'll get there around 10:05 and then have 10 minutes to get my boarding pass, mow through security like John Rambo through North Vietnamese, and mosey on into my plane. 

So naturally I'm pretty pleased when my train pulls into the Ronald Reagan National Airport Metro station at 9:57. That gives me about 18 minutes to run through an airport, which, fortunately, I'm pretty experienced in. Unfortunately, I don't know what airline my flight's on, so I go with my gut feeling getting off the Metro and head to my right. The departure TVs are telling me that my flight is U.S. Air, which is good because that's the direction I walked in, but apparently my gate is in Terminal A, and all the signs around me are telling me where to go to wait for the shuttle to Terminal A. Not one to wait for shuttles when my walkin' legs are perfectly capable of carrying my lithe frame from one end of a building to another, I decide to walk briskly to my terminal. 

Walkin' legs, deployed.

At 10:04 I get to Terminal A. All I see is jetBlue and one or two other airlines who had apparently wronged Reagan National Airport in a past life, but no U.S. Air. I catch a peak at a little sign at the terminal entrance, and it tells me that U.S. Airways is Terminal C. You might recognize Terminal C as the complete opposite side of a 3-terminal airport. I certainly did, and I expressed this recognition by punching the top of the door frame as I stormed out of Terminal A, drawing suspicious glances from the two other people who apparently did have actual business in Terminal A. I briefly consider that I may have misread the departure TV, but I quickly dismiss this possibility as so far beyond the realm of probability as to render itself impossible. 

I get back to Terminal B by 10:08, and realize just how poorly marked an airport Reagan is. There's a single sign upon arrival telling incoming passengers where to turn towards U.S. Airways, but you have to have practically already turned in that direction to see it. There's another sign further down to tell you to go upstairs to check in, but you either have to have already given up on your search for the check-in desk and be helplessly yet comically turning in circles in listless frustration to see it, or fortuitously have been born with a backwards skull.

Unlike you, this owl knows where to go to get his boarding pass.

Luckily for me, I don't have to rely on this frustration because I've been to this airport before and know that upstairs is where the real party is. I go up the escalator, and, luckily for me, the U.S. Airways check-in desk is the last of every single domestic airline company's. Finally, at 10:11, after having already been in the airport for 14 minutes, about 10 of which had been spent going in the wrong direction, I get to the check-in kiosk. I push my credit card into the machine, enter in CHA because I'm flying to Charlotte, and wait for my boarding passes to print. I've got between 4 and 9 minutes to get to my gate. I've noticed that the first sign after check-in points passengers to gates 23-34, and the departure TV says I need 23A. Essentially, once I get through security after checking in, I'll be in my gate. I'm preparing to eke this one out by a nose. 

Then, the unimaginable happened. Taking it upon itself to regulate my punctuality, this cold, heartless, soulless machine tells me that I'm too late to check in for my flight.

The following scene could easily have been avoided with a T-800 check-in kiosk.

I check the time: 10:11 AM. I still have 19 minutes; surely I can reason with this machine. Operating under the admittedly shaky logic that physical violence might subdue the electrically powered piece of machinery into printing my god-forsaken boarding pass, I begin mashing the kiosk with my fists. I loudly and explicitly inform the soldered mesh of metal and copper wire of precisely what sexual acts it can perform upon itself in its private time, while it implicitly informs me of precisely where I can shove my boarding pass. I slam my head against it and whimper like a beaten dog. I throw my bags down onto the floor and start kicking the Christ-fearing crap out of them. The small child and his young parents behind me are watching this meltdown of human psyche in a mixture of horror and shock.  

Ultimately I give up on convincing the computer and decide I need to talk to a person. I am mere feet from my gate and, even after suffering a psychological crisis wherein I singlehandedly disillusioned the naive and innocent Weltanschauung of a 5-year-old child, still have 17 minutes until my plane takes off. Surely a human being will understand the injustices I am suffering. 

Lines be damned, I run in front of every person waiting to punctually check in to their flights, demanding the services and attention of a living, breathing, soul-bearing fellow person. My first interaction proved less than fruitful, as one of the ladies that makes sure everyone goes to the correct check-in kiosk tries to direct me to another check-in kiosk, to whom I promptly explain that I have no use of such unsophisticated hunks of metallurgy as those considering their refusal to print my boarding pass. The lady agrees that I need to talk to a person, but then tells that person that I've missed my flight. Insulted, I remind her that I haven't missed it, it's still goddamn there and will be for the next 15 minutes; to which she coldly replies, without daring to break her permanent airline customer service smile, "Yes, but you're too late to check in so you've missed it." Luckily for her, I had previously exhausted all my fist-beating on door frames and electronic screens and had reserved none for her face.

I go up to the person whom that lady had previously told I had missed my flight, hoping he would be more receptive to my plight than that woman's face had been to the concept of changing expression. Unfortunately, he's acting as if I've missed my flight too, rather than fallen victim to the clerical error of a machine. He types away for a little bit, and we talk about South Carolina because he was from Spartanburg and that's what people from South Carolina do when they find each other outside of their natural habitat, and all of a sudden it's 10:17. At this point, humans have been of little help to me and I have no chance of making it to this gate before it closes.

Eventually Guy A gets called away because they need someone with a passing knowledge of Spanish over at some other check-in station, and I'm left with Guy B, who hands me a boarding pass to a 12:15 flight and sends me on my merry little way. I go down the escalator at 10:24. There's no one waiting in the security line, so I go through that in a matter of seconds. I get my belt and shoes back on, repack my laptop, and go past gate 23A at 10:29 AM. I watched my plane take off just to stick it to that clown of a kiosk who didn't believe in me, and headed down to my new gate. 

I text Cullen to let him know that he doesn't have to come get me until around 2 PM now. I go to a bar in the terminal and grab a cheeseburger and a beer, and just kinda hang out there until my new flight starts boarding. I realize, of course, that I don't have a seat on this flight, so I'm standbying the shit out of it. Unfortunately, my standbying efforts fall short, and I'm advised to go to a little booth at the end of the terminal where they deal with airport vagabonds such as myself. It's two days before Thanksgiving, so right now weaseling my way onto flights I'm not scheduled to be on isn't looking like a strong game plan. The lady at the desk tells me she can get me first on the waiting list for a 1:45, though, so hopefully that pans out. I tell Cullen not to get me until around 3:30 and pass out in the gate. 

I wake up to a text from Cullen at 12:53 PM reading:

Wtf. I wake up to a bunch if messages and missed calls. What's going on?

Apparently Cullen had forgotten all about the night where he called me, asked me what day I was coming home, and then proceeded to tell me to tell my mom to not worry about picking me up in Charlotte that afternoon because he had me covered. Had I made my original flight, I would have been waiting in Charlotte for at least an hour and a half for someone to come rescue me. Although lesser men would take this incident as a stroke of good fortune in an otherwise dreadful day, I'll instead derive the entire moral of the anecdote from this happy coincidence, and leave you with the thought that, rather than missing a flight, perhaps a higher Providence was watching out for me on that particular November morning. No, I am not above arguing that an omniscient and omnipotent power monitors my waiting times.

He's got nothing better to do.

Needless to say, considering who was playing on my team that day, I squeezed my way onto the 1:30 flight to Charlotte. I got there at the exact same time as Cullen, and we enjoyed a wonderful drive home together. And when you consider all the circumstances, everything worked out for everyone; I got home, Cullen was saved the shame of arriving late, and you, yearning faithful, even finagled a blog post out of the deal. Look who's the lucky winner there. And, as luck would have it, that assignment wasn't actually due until the next Tuesday, so this entire incident was really just a big misunderstanding.  




Ed.'s note: This post was written more or less entirely via writtenkitten.net. I suggest this medium to anyone writing any work of note or prestige. It is a trailblazer in its own time.