One Day+

Let me say right off the bat that I realize that everything that follows consists of First World Problems and that there are worse things and I should always look on the bright side and count my blessings and I need a sense of perspective and blah blah blah blah fucking blah.
So in other words, shut up.  I’m going to complain – and may do so in a hyperbolic manner for comedic effect and I’m fully aware that my annoying experiences don’t qualify as some sort of horrific suffering – and I don’t want to hear any crap about my sense of entitlement or whininess or whatever the fuck you’re going to complain about, because honestly?  Being annoyed by hearing about First World Problems is largely a First World Problem in and of itself.  Think about it; if you’re living in some sort of Third World squalor you’re not worrying about some whiny white guy saying “FML” on the Internet while you’re busy searching for potable water and wishing you’d gotten a vaccination for polio, are you?
Anyway, last week I made a trip back to the old homeland to visit with my family, and, more to the point, to meet the latest addition to said family, my beautiful new grand-niece, Chloe.
It started out promisingly enough, in that shortly before my trip United, the airline whisking me away to the frozen north, released an app for my phone, which meant that I could check in, pay for my checked bag, and display my boarding passes right from my phone.  Yay, technology.
I got to Dulles with some time to spare, even though the bus ride from the parking lot to the terminal took quite some time, as I had parked near Shuttle Stop 12 and there were 18 stops in between there and the terminal.
In any case, after stopping to finalize the check-in and get the tag for my bag before dropping it off with TSA for inspection, I found myself just standing there waiting around, as no one was bothering to notice me.  Finally, someone did, and I was on my way through security.
At some point between going through security and arriving at my gate my flight out had been delayed by an hour, which meant that, by the time we landed and I got off the plane in Chicago I’d have about twenty minutes to get to connecting flight, which is cutting things pretty close given that my connecting flight would be in another terminal entirely and would involve another shuttle bus ride.
I was actually supposed to meet up with my brother, who was flying in from Texas, in Chicago.
Not remembering that there was another, later flight, I thought for certain that, unless that flight was also delayed, I’d end up spending the night in Chicago.
Despite my hopes (or maybe because of, depending on what impact my hopes have on causality) that they had overestimated things, the airline was completely correct about exactly how long my flight would be delayed and so I boarded the plane with an increasingly shrinking window of opportunity to arrive in Chicago on time.
As we made our way out to the runway that window continued to shrink, and, even though I was being blinded by the glare of the sunlight reflecting off the wing, we were informed that our takeoff had been delayed due to weather.
Bad weather elsewhere had created a narrow corridor of safe travel, and that was, at that time, being used solely for the benefit of arriving planes.
We sat there for over two hours waiting, and by the time we actually took off from Virginia, the flight out of Chicago had actually landed – with my brother on board* – in Michigan.
Once in Chicago, I found that my new flight out had also been delayed by a considerable margin.
Having failed to arrive home in time for dinner, I decided to get something to eat, and was forced to get a pizza from the only non-overwhelmed place in the entire airport.  It was kind of depressing that in Chicago of all places I had to settle for a pizza that was not of sufficient quality to be served at a gas station in the middle of, let’s say, Nebraska.
It’s worth noting that when we landed in Chicago, in the course of putting them back into my carry-on bag, I broke my very expensive noise-cancelling headphones.  I ended up buying a cheap (though expensive) pair of earbuds while I was in O’Hare to get me through the last leg of my journey.
After spending what seemed like an eternity sitting around waiting I was on the plane and eventually we took off, arriving in the UP an hour later than scheduled, and almost six hours later than when I’d originally been scheduled to arrive.
The last fifteen minutes of the flight were set to the soundtrack of a couple of babies crying at maximum volume.
When I booked my flight I’d been unable to also book a rental car.  Eventually I found that, for whatever reason, you couldn’t book a car after 6 PM, so I booked one for the following morning, with the expectation that someone would bring me up to the airport in the morning to pick it up.  However, on a positive note, when I arrived and was greeted by my sister, brother, and niece, I found that the rental place was open, and my sister had checked to see if they had something available for me to pick up, which they did.
As bad as that day was – the worst part was the time spent sitting on the runway at Dulles trapped on the plane and wishing I could just be let off to go home and have them call me when they were ready to leave – the trip back was worse.
Before I left my mom’s place that day I noticed that at some point – I don’t know how or when – the front of the rental car had suffered some damage in the form of a very large scrape and a dent, so I had to fill out an accident report when I returned it (and provide my insurance information).  That flight out, too, because of course it was, was delayed, though not by a lot.  I was actually kind of glad, as it had reduced the amount of time I’d have to spend sitting around in O’Hare by a fair amount without making it so that I’d have to make a mad dash to get to my gate.  After all, I’d spent enough time sitting around in O’Hare already, so this was a good thing.
At my gate, I saw that the plane was already there, so that was a positive sign.
Everything went south just when it was time to begin boarding the plane.  It seemed that while we had a plane, we didn’t actually have a pilot, and so the flight was delayed by two hours while we waited for him to arrive from Newark.
Then it was delayed again.
Finally, more than three hours later, we boarded the plane.  After we’d all been seated, we were informed that the pilot still hadn’t arrived, but that he would be there shortly.  He arrived, begged our indulgence, and said that he needed another fifteen minutes to get settled in.
Twenty minutes later we headed out to the runway.  And then we sat there for an hour.
Finally, the pilot announced that there was something broken on the plane that he had been attempting to fix without success, and that we needed to go back to the gate to allow a maintenance crew to come aboard to fix it.
We went back to the gate and sat and waited.  Eventually, someone announced that the problem would be fixed in twenty minutes.  Fifty minutes later they said that they needed another hour, at which time they would have either fixed it or decided that it would be easier to transfer us to another plane.  They also pointed out that we were entirely at their mercy, as there were no other flights out – either to Dulles or National – available to us.  They then made us get off the plane.
Sometime later it was announced that the plane we had been on had been rendered completely useless.  It wasn’t clear whether this was caused by the original problem or by the attempts to fix said problem.  In any case, we were going with Plan B, which was to fly out on another plane.
Unfortunately, said plane wouldn’t arrive for another hour, at which time it would need to be cleaned and catered.
More than an hour later – I remain convinced that when airline employees say things like “in fifteen minutes” they’re just making funny noises that, by sheer coincidence, happen to sound like they’re saying “in fifteen minutes,” as they have no actual understanding of the concept of time of the meaning of the words they’re inadvertently forming, and that they might as well be saying something like “woozle wazzle,” and may even be some form of jazz scatting**, like, “zippedy zee zaw zow" -  we were informed that the plane had arrived and – good news – had already been cleaned, so we just had to wait for them to cater it.
Because, you know, that’s so important for an hour and a half long flight at nearly midnight Central time.
Finally, we were on the plane, everyone had settled back in and done the overhead compartment stuffing, and we actually took to the air.
We landed at Dulles, made our way to the gate…and then parked just yards away from the gate for ten minutes.
When the pilot said, “Folks, we’re not quite at the gate yet, so please remain seated with your seat belts fastened,” I said, “Of course we’re not at the gate.  Why would we be?  Next he’ll be telling us that we have to fly back to Chicago.”
Fortunately, I was wrong about that last bit, though honestly, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised at that point if I hadn’t been.
Once we were finally off the plane, I got to the train back to the terminal. 
The train that runs every six minutes. 
The train that wouldn’t be returning for another 5 minutes and 59 seconds, because of course I got there just as it left.
The one bit of good luck was that I was the only person on the shuttle to the parking lot, and the driver took me directly to my stop.
When it was all said and done – my parking ticket was rendered unreadable in the course of six days in my wallet, so I had to go through a cashier line to get out of the parking lot – I finally arrived at home at 4 AM.  Which meant that my journey home, which involves something like two and a half hours of time actually spent in the air, took me about 14 hours.
Added to the time it took me to get to the UP, I spent a total of something like 26 hours spent in airports and airplanes.
More than one full day of my vacation was pissed away in that fashion.  That’s 1/6 of my vacation.
First World Problem or not, I think that at least rises to the level of something to be a bit annoyed about.
About the only thing that went well in all of it was that my bag didn’t get lost at any point.
As for the actual vacation itself, I’ll talk about that in another post.  I will say, though, that while I was in the UP I picked up a bit of a cold, which helped make the return voyage that much more fun.
After all, somewhere around hour nine into my nicotine fit, with some fat guy encroaching into my seating area, I tried giving meditation a shot in an effort to achieve the sort of Zen-like calm that’s necessary to fulfill the desire so many people have for no one to ever complain about anything, but it’s difficult to take in deep cleansing breaths when your nose is plugged with a cement-like coating of snot and your chest feels like it’s in a vice.
The cold even ruined it for me when I was finally free to feed my nicotine cravings.
But I made it, and I suppose that, as is the point of vacations, it ultimately serves to make me a little better prepared to return to work.

*My brother also suffered a few delays, though nothing as severe, and he thought that he would miss the earlier flight out of Chicago as well.  He had more or less intended to do just that, given that he knew about my delays, and doing so would mean that we’d still meet up and arrive in the UP together.  However, the earlier flight out was delayed sufficiently that he was hustled on board when he arrived.

**Alternatively, they’re filled with the Holy Spirit and are speaking in tongues.  The bottom line is that any kind of time estimate airline employees give you is entirely meaningless.

eX-Ray

Last week found me back in the (not-so) frozen North, as I had to make the trek back to the UP to attend my niece Jourdan’s wedding.
I’ll have more on that in a future post – along with pictures – but for right now I wanted to detail my journey back to Virginia.
I had thought about taking the early morning flight, which departs from Hancock at around 6 AM, but the problem with that would have been that I’d have arrived back in Virginia at around 11:30 AM.  That would have been good, inasmuch as I would have had the better part of the day ahead of me upon my return, but the problem was that there wouldn't have been anyone available to pick me up from the airport at that time on a Tuesday.
And so I found myself taking the afternoon flight, which, ideally, would have placed me back in VA sometime around 8 PM.
Ideally.
The Houghton County Memorial Airport isn’t a big place.  Really, it’s just one big open room, with a partition separating the terminal from the secured area.  There’s only the one gate, which is why I always laugh when I fly there and the flight attendant, being unfamiliar with the place, says, “For those of you continuing on, you can find your gate information from one of the electronic boards.”  Yeah, okay.
In any case, when it comes time to go through the TSA check, the line forms along the partition that separates the gate from the terminal, and there’s just a security rope separating passengers from the non-passengers.
On Tuesday they announced that because the plane we would be flying out on was a bit late getting in, they wanted everyone to go through TSA a bit sooner in order to speed things up once the plane had arrived and was ready for us to board, so we all got in line and waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.
Finally, a TSA agent poked her head out from behind the partition and said that a piece of equipment had failed, and this was causing the delay.  It was later clarified that it was, in fact, the x-ray machine.  This meant that they had to screen everyone’s carry-on luggage by hand.
While I was standing there waiting, I heard…something, something that made me turn my head and look into the waiting area where non-passengers were seeing off friends and family who were leaving or else waiting to see friends and family who would be arriving.
I’m not sure what it was I heard, exactly, but there was something about it that sparked some sense of recognition deep inside me.  So I turned, and my eyes fell upon a rather large woman, who looked vaguely familiar, talking to an older, even larger man, and as I studied her features and took note of her mannerisms, recognition washed over me in a wave, and I thought, “Of fucking course.”
It was my ex-wife.
I caught a glimpse of her in a store, once, nearly eleven years ago, but other than that, it’s been over sixteen years since I last saw her. 
Given that she was now the equivalent of at least two and a half of the woman I’d known, I initially doubted that it could be her, but despite it all, the features were there, the mannerisms were there, and I realized that the man next to her was her father, and then I spotted her mother next to him.  (Later, I also noticed her sister.)
I assume they were waiting for someone to arrive.  I didn’t talk to them, and while I’m fairly certain that my ex-mother-in-law spotted me, I tried to remain inconspicuous, and I don’t believe that my ex herself saw me.
I have to admit, though, that all things considered, there was part of me that thought that I’d kind of like for her to see me.  I mean, it’s as though we’re inversely proportionate to the way we were when we last saw each other.  I’m much thinner, and better-looking overall, and she’s…not.  So, you know, life well-lived being the best revenge an all that.
But, really, I have no desire for revenge, there’s honestly nothing for us to talk about after all of these years, and, given the issues she’s had with brain, there’s a good chance she wouldn’t have recognized or known me anyway.
Still, there was one tiny, cruel part of me that thought, “Man, did I ever dodge a bullet.”
And there was an even tinier, even crueler part that thought, “Bullet nothing; I dodged that boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Her appearance aside, just seeing her was…unpleasant, and was something I definitely could have gone without doing, so I found myself thinking – not for the first or last time that day – that I really should have taken that earlier flight.
The manual screening caused a 40-minute delay for the flight, which meant that I’d only have 20 minutes to get to my gate in Chicago, and made me conclude that my suitcase probably wouldn’t make it onto the plane.  I wasn’t overly concerned, given that I was going home and there wasn’t anything in there that I absolutely needed.  Still, it was an annoyance.
Once we got to Chicago, we were forced to circle for over 10 minutes due to a thunderstorm, which left me even less time to get to my gate, and left me certain that my suitcase wouldn’t make it.
However, once I got to my gate I found that the flight to Dulles had also been delayed, so I had enough time to get something to eat.  I was still fairly certain that my suitcase wouldn’t make it.  Then the flight was delayed again.  Then we boarded and sat and waited for a long time.  We finally started moving, got to the runway, and were told that we had to wait some more, as there was a storm between Chicago and VA, so we might have to change the flight plan.  Then, a few minutes later, the captain announced that he hadn’t received any new information other than that we should just take off within the next couple of minutes.
So we did.
The delays, by the way, were caused by the fact that the plane we were originally supposed to fly out on had been struck by lightning when it was flying into Chicago, so they had to scramble to find a replacement – the captain took the opportunity to put some spin on the whole thing and say that it was an example of United’s commitment to safety – and the replacement plane hadn’t been quite ready and needed to be cleaned and stocked, which added the additional delays.
Eventually I was back in VA, and I was surprised to find that my suitcase had, in fact, made the journey, and was even more amazed to find that it was right there as soon as I walked to baggage claim.
Oh, and as something of an aside, while I was refilling my pockets and whatnot after going through security in Hancock, I noticed that my sister had called while I was in line.  I tried calling her back, but got her voicemail.  When I landed in Chicago, I had a voicemail from her telling me that she had just called to tell me about the earthquake in the DC area.  At that point I actually looked at my work e-mail and saw that there had been one from facilities talking about how the building had been evacuated as a precaution after the quake hit.
There have been a couple of earthquakes in this area since I’ve lived here, but I’ve never actually noticed them happening.  It seems that this one I would have noticed had I been here.
(Upon returning home I found that the quake hadn’t resulted in even so much as a crooked picture on the wall.)
And that was my trip back to Virginia.  Next time I’ll tell you about my time in Michigan.

The Saga Of The Return Flight

In the course of my trip home a lot of blog-worthy things happened, and over the next few entries I’ll get to them, but before that I need to get the sorrowful tale of Jon’s return to Virginia out of the way.
To do so effectively, though, I need to start with the tale of Jon’s departure from Virginia.
In booking my trip – via Orbitz – I was looking primarily at two factors: cost and the ability to sync up with my brother Brad, who was travelling to Michigan from Austin, Texas.
I was able to find a flight that would allow me to meet up with Brad in Minneapolis for the last leg of the trip, but I wasn’t able to find a return flight that would allow me to leave Michigan at the same time. Or rather, I wasn’t able to find one that would allow me to arrive in Virginia on that same day, as any flight leaving from Michigan at the same time would necessitate an overnight stay in Minneapolis.
As mentioned, the trip I booked involved two carriers – United and Northwest – and added a layover in Indianapolis instead of the more typical route which is Dulles to Minneapolis to Hancock.
In addition to allowing me to sync up my arrival with Brad’s, this particular trip was the cheapest I could find, by hundreds of dollars.
While I noted that the total duration was excessive, I assumed that my layover time was fairly equally divided between the airports.
Such was not the case. On the way to Michigan, for example, I was stuck in Indianapolis for over five hours, compared to the hour or so that I was in Minneapolis.
I can tell you that my stay in Indianapolis was really, really boring, as it’s a relatively small airport and offers far fewer distractions and diversions than, for example, Minneapolis.
(As an aside, while at the airport a question occurred to me: why don’t airports have movie theaters?)
The real horror, though, was on the return trip, where I found that I had a two and a half hour layover in Minneapolis, and a nearly seven hour layover in Indianapolis.
I tried to change my flight to see if I could eliminate this stay, but found that to do so I’d have to go on standby status, and I didn’t really feel like gambling in that manner.
I should have gambled.
In hour two of my stay in Indianapolis, my cell phone rang and I was informed that my checked bag was at the claims office for Northwest, and asked did I know that, or was I operating on the incorrect assumption that my bag had been checked all the way through to Dulles?
In fact, that was the assumption that I was incorrectly operating on.
Turns out that if there is more than a six hour delay between flights, the computer does not consider it to be a connecting flight, and so baggage must be claimed and re-checked.
For the record, at Dulles and Minneapolis, once you’re on a concourse, you’re free to roam about all of the concourses, as you’re in the secured area.
Not so at Indianapolis, where you have to actually leave the secured area in order to move from one concourse to the next, and so must go through security again if you need to get to a different concourse.
I suppose that’s because it’s something of a hub, where most people arriving for connecting flights generally have to check in with another carrier to get to their destination.
In any case, I decided not to check my bag right away, as I was able to strap my carry-on bag to it and use its wheels to move about a little more freely than I could with my carry-on bag hanging from my shoulder.
After getting lousy service at a Fridays – which I can’t complain about too much, as the slowness of my server helped eat up a lot of the ample time – I found that I was so bored, and so annoyed with the hangnails I had and could do nothing about, that I actually got a manicure.
(“It wouldn’t even occur to most guys to do this,” the manicurist said, in a nice passive-aggressive assault on my masculinity. Still, she was friendlier than the waitress at Fridays, who could barely spare me a word, until after I’d paid the check when, as an afterthought, she said, “Oh, and there’s one other thing; you have a good day.”)
Eventually it was getting close enough to boarding time that I decided to check my bag.
That’s when the horror really began.
The flight to Dulles, I was informed, had been delayed by an hour and a half, so I had even more time to kill.
(I’d originally thought about taking a cab into Indianapolis and finding a mall or a movie theater or something to pass the time, but had eventually decided that, even with nearly seven hours to kill, I didn’t feel up to wandering around a strange city by myself.)
So, I sat myself down and did some more reading of *Sigh* Praline’s book (which is excellent, by the way), and eventually decided that I should check to make sure there hadn’t been any additional delays.
There had been. The flight was delayed by another hour.
This meant that, at best, I wouldn’t be arriving at Dulles until close to midnight.
Bear in mind that my original arrival time had been scheduled for 8:39 PM, and that I’d left Michigan at 7:10 AM.
I asked the guy at the counter what was going on and he said that the plane had been delayed from leaving LaGuardia due to a mechanical issue. That problem had been fixed, but in the interim bad weather had moved in. At that time, the plane had yet to leave New York for Washington, and, in his opinion, probably wouldn’t make it to Indianapolis at all.
He asked me where I was going from Dulles, and I told him that Dulles was home, so he said, “Let me see what I can do,” and made a call.
(There was a group of young people behind me who were in the same boat and asked if they could eavesdrop on our conversation. This will be an important detail later on in the saga.)
He informed me that there was a flight leaving for Chicago that made a connection with a flight to Dulles, and that it was set to depart right now, but they were holding it for people like me. He got my bag moved, printed me up a boarding pass, and I was on my way, and soon found myself in a really shitty seat at the back of the plane on a flight to O’Hare.
Shitty as the seat was, I was glad to finally be on a plane.
Naturally there was a fifteen minute delay on take-off, so by the time I got to Chicago I would have about a half an hour to get to my gate, even though it was a very short flight.
I hadn’t been very hungry in the time immediately before I left, and had been assuming that I’d have plenty of time in Indianapolis to eat, but now that I had no time, I found that I was starving, naturally.
However, upon landing in Chicago and finding my flight on the board, I found that this flight, too, had been delayed by an hour.
After finding my gate, I headed to a food court to make use of the time I’d gained.
The place was packed, and if I’d gotten in line I’d probably still be there waiting.
Finally, at about 10:00 PM Eastern, my ass was finally in a seat on a plane flying to Dulles. It bears repeating that my flight had left Michigan at 7:10 AM Eastern.
While getting on the plane in Chicago, there was some weird feud, consisting of a lot of angry words and swearing, going on between some guy and some random pregnant chick. I think it had been a dispute about him cutting in front of a her, even though she was, as she pointed out, “seven fucking months pregnant,” and, based on some random statement she made to the person she was talking to on her cell phone while having the feud, the wife of a veteran (Update: Or was herself a veteran. Bad Jon! Sexist Jon!), and him apologizing poorly for it and not believing that he’d done anything wrong, and it was all pretty uncomfortable, especially with his wife/girlfriend being amused and giggling about it all the whole time.
Anyway, I had another shitty seat – this time a center seat – and by the time I landed, got my bag – one of the first five or so to appear on the carousel, marking the one purely good lucky break* of the night – and getting picked up by Kathleen, I didn’t actually set foot inside my house until nearly 12:45 AM.
Again, this is after having left Michigan at 7:10 AM on what was now the previous day. This is a trip that, barring any incident, usually takes, at most, six hours, with the majority of that being time spent in airports, as the total flying time is just under three hours.
Here’s where that detail about the young people who were behind me in Indianapolis comes into play. Like me, they’d transferred to the Chicago flight.
As we were standing outside waiting for our respective rides at Dulles, I said, “We finally made it.”
One of the girls said that she’d looked at the arrivals board and that it showed that the flight we were originally on, the one that was so seriously delayed, and on which I had a very good seat at the front of the plane, had supposedly arrived at Dulles at 8:50 PM, a scant eleven minutes late.
I don’t see how that can possibly be true, and I don’t see how I can hold on to what little sanity I have left if I allow myself to believe that, so I’m going to say that it never happened and that transferring to the Chicago flight was the right thing to do.
If there’s a moral in that story anywhere, I suppose it would be that it’s a damn good thing I also asked for today off. Alternatively, it’s that next time I have to take a much closer look at my itinerary.
As a contrast to my story, I should mention the story of my brother’s trip to Michigan. He got on a plane at Austin that flew directly to Minneapolis, and we boarded the plane to Hancock about twenty minutes after he arrived at the gate. I don’t know how his trip out of Michigan went, but given the blatant favoritism the Universe showed him, I can’t help but think that it went just as smoothly.

Random Travel Anecdotes Department:
Anecdote One
On the flight from Minneapolis to Hancock, I overheard the people sitting across from me talking about friends and acquaintances they had in common back in the UP. One such person was someone who’d gone to my high school and whose older sister I graduated with. I believe he was in 7th grade when I was a senior. The girl participating in the conversation, who is currently working towards getting a PhD, mentioned that the person they were talking about was quite a few years older than she is. So, to summarize, someone who is much younger than someone else who is several years younger than I am, is old enough to be working on her PhD. *Sigh*

Anecdote Two
While wandering around the Indianapolis airport, I noticed an attractive young woman out of the corner of my eye who was talking to someone on a cell phone.
I took note of the fact that she was attractive and thought no more about it as I shuffled along, until I heard her saying, “…fucked me SO hard!”
That got my attention.
However, she went on to say, “They didn’t have any of my fucking flight information, and now I missed my fucking plane!” She then started crying.
So rather than loudly sharing salacious details about her sexual exploits, she was loudly sharing details of her lousy travel – or lack thereof – experience.
I immediately – particularly when the tears started – went from being mildly titillated to feeling bad for her. A tale of hard luck is much less exciting than a tale of a hard fuck.

*Sure, if you’re one of those “count your blessings” types, you could say that getting someone helpful at the counter who booked me on the Indianapolis to Chicago to Dulles flight was a lucky break – at least if we ignore that complete fabrication about my original flight arriving in Dulles nearly on time – but that’s only lucky in context, and in comparison to what might have happened. It’s like saying that, despite all of the waiting and the delays and the running around, I should feel lucky that I arrived at each of my destinations safely, rather than dying in a fiery crash or something. And of course I’m luckier than the girl who got “fucked SO hard.” Even so, I say screw that. Those are boring blessings. Not having something bad happen to you is not the same as having a good thing happen to you. However, not having to wait forever for my bag at baggage claim is a stroke of luck even when shorn of context. It was, as I said, a purely good stroke of luck.

If I Were Catholic Today Would HAVE To Count As Penance

I'm home.
It was a struggle.
More later.