Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

I picked a bad day to try to fly to Missouri. Due to the heightened security, the airport was chaos. The line to get through the security was about 1 mile long and took 4 hours to get through. It snaked all over the place and ultimately got pushed back into the parking garage.

Ultimately, I missed my much delayed flight by 10 minutes. I could have made it, but I made a bad guess that cost me about 25 minutes. At one point in the queue, we had to split into two seemingly equal lines. However, it turned out that one line went to 2 screening stations and the other went to only one. So the other line was twice as fast.

That strategic blunder brings me to my current predicament. I’m anxiously waiting to see if I can standby onto the next flight to St. Louis. Apparently I’m 25 on the list; normally there’s no chance I’d get on. But since everyone is getting backed up in security, other flights have been letting around 40 to 50 standbys on.

If I can catch the flight and it’s roughly on time, it will have only set me back by about 6 hours. Overall that’s not too bad, but the 2 hours drive to Columbia will happen around midnight, instead of early evening.

The line getting to security wasn’t that bad considering how bad it could have been. I stood by some very friendly people. One woman I spoke to was convinced that by the end of our adventure we’d begun such good friends in our hours together, that not only would she be coming to the wedding, but she’d be the Matron of Honor.

Crissy, of course, would ask, “Vijay, who’s that person?” My response, “Don’t worry; she and I go way back.”

I also stood by a friendly executive from Iowa and we talked shop for a good while. His company does a lot of image processing and storage (medical, security, and defense). They are having scaling problems and while ideally he could build a custom NAS, we both agreed that it’s a risky investment. We talked about some potential open source and Windows solutions.

Unfortunately, my talks with my new friends got cut short as they got a break and discovered a previously unknown “First Class line”.

It was shortly after this that I picked the wrong branch of the line and my new neighbors were friendly, but extremely angry. Time started to move a bit slower at that point. :-)

I eventually made it through security. The actually security screening was barely any different than the usual. They just glanced in my bags. The whole “heightened” part of the screening took an additional 10 seconds.

In the line, we couldn’t see any flight status monitors and the telephone/web status was very old. So I asked a TSA worker if the flights were generally running very late to let people get through security. Her response, “I have no idea. I just work at the airport.”

Well, I guess that’s good enough for government work.

Anyway, I got my shoes and everything re-assembled and rushed over to where my plane should have been. At the gate, there was no plane and another line. Fortunately though, at the end of the line was my old friend the executive that filled me in on the details. Basically, we just missed the plane and this new line was so we could get booked on another flight.

This new line was SOOO slow. Each person being helped was taking about 15 minutes, because most people were connecting through St. Louis and they needed to get both legs scheduled in a way correctly so that they would not stuck at another airport.

By now, people started getting really mad and there were lots of arguments that were close to becoming fights over things like people cutting in line or the airline representative needing to close a station for various reasons.

I was amused by this change, because at this point I felt fortunate to be able to stay upright. We’d all been standing for at least 6 hours and I hadn’t even had breakfast yet. I knew I should be angry, but I was too tired and hungry.

One man said, “I’d really like to get my hands on those guys that caused all this.” Someone else responded, “Jesus wants us to forgive our fellow man.” The first guy’s response was, “Well, I don’t believe in Jesus, so I just want to kill them.” Unfortunately, the conversation stopped there. I would have liked to see what comparative morality insights could be generated in such a situation.

I finally got to see the American Airlines representative and despite her going into the 12th hour of her shift, she was very friendly and got me on the standby list.

So I went and got breakfast and lunch (mmm.. Qdoba) and now I’m anxiously awaiting the next flight to start boarding so that I can see if I get to leave Seattle today.