July 13, 2013

• Trapped

  I feel like Tom Hanks right now from The Terminal. Except being trapped at the airport is mainly, totally my fault versus a political revolution.

  So it all started with my flying in for an interview this morning @ 3:30 AM to Denver and driving up to Loveland, the departure/arrival from LAX/DEN was very smooth and car rental was a breeze, great. Once I got to Loveland, I did my interview, then proceeded to go drive down to Boulder to meet with an old co-worker/friend to hang out and catch up, which was also fine.

  Things started going south when I made the huge error of not double checking my flight time, I just simply saw the number 10:15 PM and automatically assumed that was my departure time... Huge idiocy here at this point. 

  I'd like to stop this story right here for a moment for a side story, currently at the airport plugged into a power terminal, and some rude bitch next to me keeps bouncing in her chair which I am leaning on the other side of. I decided to fight fire with fire, i.e. subversive passive aggressiveness and take off my shoes to stink up the entire terminal zone. I'm getting massive stink eye from everyone here right now and some people are packing up, unfortunately the girl is holding her position strong, and refusing to budge. After consulting the generals, it seems that this enemy is immune to the mustard gas, so we're back to the drawing board... Anyway, back to this unexciting story.

  I get to the terminal at the airport thinking that I'm an hour and a half early, but I check the departure time and my jaw drops to see that the time of my flight is 8:55 PM and not 10:15 PM. I double check my itinerary to find that I've mixed up the departure/arrival times, and now I have approximately 10 minutes to make it through security and onto my flight. 

  Not to sound anti-climactic, but the fact that it is 10:45 PM and I'm still in Denver should be a telltale sign that I did not make my flight, there were a couple of other flights heading out to LAX within that timeframe but with different airlines. Trying to negotiate with the service desk to put me on one of those flights failed miserably, despite my attempts to be my most coy self with the 50 year old overweight service desk employee, she wasn't having any of my flirting/begging/raging. She gave me this look like 'We don't like your kind of people here' (ok I might have made that up), and stuck me on the next flight which is at 8:30 AM and told me to go find a hotel. Of course instead I decided to exercise civil disobedience and ignore her commands by instead sitting in at the airport until my flight time came up, also because I don't want to pay anymore money than I've already paid for this clusterfuck of a mess I've gotten myself into. I've never missed a flight before so this is a first, it is truly an excruciating experience to have to sit here and watch all of these people going to the places they are supposed to be going while I sit here in limbo trying to get comfortable in these cleverly designed airport chairs which seem to have been crafted specifically for the purposes of stopping people from sleeping in them. 

  Who knows what's going to happen for the next 10 hours, probably nothing, but still, you never know. I want to sleep, but I can't give up my outlet, the place I'm sitting right now is prime real-estate and I can see there are people surrounding me like vultures waiting for the first person in our quarry to separate and break formation so that they can dive in tandem to peck out our eyes and steal our spots, leaving us to blindly writhe around in pain, trying to feel around for where we were sitting, searching for the past but finding nothing other than the warm crimson fluids cascading out of our bloody sockets.

  I'm still getting weird looks from people for having my shoes placed neatly next to me. Is this not part of normal airport etiquette ? Is it possible that I am THAT guy that people talk about when recalling horrific tales of being stuck at the airport? 

  "Sorry, that seat is taken, my shoes are sitting there."

  ".... Fuck you, kid."

   

  • 12:52 am
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