Sitting in a Public Place Lounging

I’m standing in a public place, my shoes are off and my pants are falling off without a belt. There’s a lady about my age telling me I have to dump out my water bottle and that I can’t have my shampoo. Where am I? I’m in the airport of course. I’ve had the worst morning this morning.

It all starts when I arrive at the US Airways terminal and one of their customer service people points out that my ticket is for a flight leaving from Raleigh-Durham, not from LaGuardia. Great. To change the ticket I’d have to pretty much buy a new one. How much? $220 or a changing fee of $150. I thought about it for a minute and then decided, you know what? #$%^ US Airways. I went to the Delta terminal after calling my parents to see if they could book a ticket for me and wound up getting a ticket for $80 at 1pm. Then those sneaky bastards told me there was an earlier flight (one that didn’t appear when my dad searched online) and that if I wanted it, it was an additional $50 changing fee. Still better than I would have ended up had I gone with US Airways. Let that be a lesson to you all.

Finally, ticketed and prepared to go through security, my half full water bottle in my shoulder bag prompts a full-on search of my suitcase which reveals that I’m carrying all kinds of contraband…which I knew would happen as soon as I realized they had found the water. And, subsequently, I knew that my huge bag of toiletries would get found. I know the rules people, I do. But who the hell wants to check a carry-on size bag when it costs $15 to do so.

Some terrorist gets a clever idea and, even though his plan is thwarted, he still wins some sort of satisfaction, knowing that he’s made the entirety of the flying public constantly inconvenienced while they have to kick off shoes, bag up their toiletries, take out their laptops and remove their coats. Well, I’m sure in the grand scheme of things this is such a tiny inconvenience that would probably have not seemed like such a hassle had it not been for the nature of this weekend. The TSA is just doing their job.

US Airways and Delta however, are trying desperately not to go bankrupt while simultaneously turning off as many customers as they can to flying.

All of this got me thinking about how well you can plan for something. My Zen for the day is this: You can’t plan for everything and sometimes you can’t plan for anything.

I’ve spent the last few weeks obsessing over getting everything just right. I would get frustrated when I didn’t plan well enough and I wound up in Manhattan having to kill time before whatever engagements I had because it didn’t make sense to go home to Queens. And I planned every detail of this weekend, right down to measuring my apartment’s dimensions so I wouldn’t end up bringing something up that wouldn’t fit. And everything was falling into place. Except for the fact that I was too quick about purchasing the ticket and I didn’t check the itinerary close enough. Hopefully, this is the only thing that will not go as planned. Because I have a short amount of time in which to move everything up. And I still don’t know how I’m going to park the truck when I get back up here to New York. Maybe I’ll leave that one hanging.

Posted by Dad