There's No Place like Home (either of them)
Tuesday December 21, 2004
Faol took half a vacation day to drive me to the airport. I had my ticket before I knew about his shift change for the week so I was leaving at a time that worked with 2nd shift but not 1st shift. I got up early enough to make love with him, and still have time to do dishes, clean out the cat box, feed the fish, and take the garbage out. He wasn’t going to have time to do it since he only had time to drop me at the door rather than go in with me then take off for work.
At American Airlines the no-luggage-to-check kiosks were set up separately and there was no one there so checking in was a breeze. The lines for the xray point seemed quite long but I realize that it was more the set up than unusual length. At one point there was an alarm like sound and half the security people moved to a point on the other side of the security point that blocked off the mall area. Others stood in the metal detector doorways to block entry. A few minutes later they all returned to their positions and we were moving again. I assume that it was a drill.
Once at the gate it turned out that the flight was delayed. I began to worry when I realized that I only had an hour layover and we were already scheduled to arrive after my next flight would start loading. We ended up leaving somewhat later than the original delay time as well. I called Tom to let him know the possibility so he could keep an eye on the arrival time. By a great stroke of luck we made up the time in the air so we only arrived about 5 min. later than scheduled. Yay! Then I hurried off to the next gate to discover that something or other had happened with the plane so we were taking a different plane or for some reason were rated for a different weight now or so they said. This resulted in 7 people having to be bumped. They asked for volunteers and I considered it. They would send us by bus to Memorial Union in Madison but that is a three – four hour bus ride from O’hare and Tom would have had to wait in Madison all that time for me. So I decided to leave it up to Fate. If they bumped me ok – bus ride and voucher for another flight, if not home shortly a lot less tired for both of us.
I was happy to discover that they were bumping based on who checked in last
so people coming from a closer distance had checked in later for the most
part, though if Faol had a working printer I would have checked in the day
before. But the result was the same. I made the cut.
Copyright © 2004 Kyril Oakwind