Sunday, December 26, 2004
Snow
I flew home on the 22nd, expecting to be back with my family some time that afternoon. Alas, I made the mistake of getting a connection in Cincinnati---just upon my arrival, a gigantic cloud blotted out the sky and unleashed a stinging pestilence of ice and snow upon the city. To make things a little more exciting, the airport had the foresight to run out of de-icing fluid, and the hotels had thoughtfully filled themselves to the brim with, well, people not including me.
So I had to sleep in the airport. Not so bad, one might think; people have been known to sleep in worse places. The temperature was comfortable, there was a carpet on the floor; there were no wild Bengal tigers prowling about---I should have been happy. Instead, I was miserable. I had to sleep on my violin, so roughly half my back hurt like the Dickens in the morning. However, that was only a minor trouble. As soon as the bloody PA system stopped blaring out "Attention! So-and-so should contact airport police immediately for an important message!" (which it did into the wee hours of the night), it lapsed into blissful, lighthearted Christmas music. By the end of that night, it was a good thing there were no Bengal tigers within reach---I swear I would have throttled each and every one of them.
As if that weren't bad enough, I woke the next morning to a series of interminable rebooking lines. Five separate times, my flight out of the place was cancelled, which necessitated standing patiently in five queues of angry sleepless lunatics for two hours each. Each followed by a few chipper moments with a bumbling sleepless flight attendant, then a few minutes of hope, then a fuzzy proclamation of catastrophe on the departure screens. When I finally landed a flight out of there that evening, it had been 30 hours since I was scheduled to arrive home.
When I grow up, I'll either be poor enough not to care about visiting other people or be rich enough to afford a private jet.
So I had to sleep in the airport. Not so bad, one might think; people have been known to sleep in worse places. The temperature was comfortable, there was a carpet on the floor; there were no wild Bengal tigers prowling about---I should have been happy. Instead, I was miserable. I had to sleep on my violin, so roughly half my back hurt like the Dickens in the morning. However, that was only a minor trouble. As soon as the bloody PA system stopped blaring out "Attention! So-and-so should contact airport police immediately for an important message!" (which it did into the wee hours of the night), it lapsed into blissful, lighthearted Christmas music. By the end of that night, it was a good thing there were no Bengal tigers within reach---I swear I would have throttled each and every one of them.
As if that weren't bad enough, I woke the next morning to a series of interminable rebooking lines. Five separate times, my flight out of the place was cancelled, which necessitated standing patiently in five queues of angry sleepless lunatics for two hours each. Each followed by a few chipper moments with a bumbling sleepless flight attendant, then a few minutes of hope, then a fuzzy proclamation of catastrophe on the departure screens. When I finally landed a flight out of there that evening, it had been 30 hours since I was scheduled to arrive home.
When I grow up, I'll either be poor enough not to care about visiting other people or be rich enough to afford a private jet.
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