Friday, December 05, 2003
Home again. Gimme a few days to sort through all the pictures of Chicago/Minneapolis/St. Paul; I promise to post one or two.
In the meantime, I'm recovering from the trip, as is Sean, as is Sophie (who stayed with Grammom and Granddad and cut her first two teeth while we were away). Getting out of Chicago was a story in and of itself.
I made the mistake of choosing style over comfort and wore a miniskirt and knee-high boots to the airport. These days, Airport Security suggests that ticketholders remove their shoes and send them through the x-ray machines, which necessitated the unzipping and yanking off of said knee-high boots, and then doing a balancing act on the other side of Security to put the boots back on. In my haste and irritation, I forgot until it was too late that not only was I wearing a very short skirt but also sheer tights and *ahem* minimal underoos, which basically meant that I mooned every passenger walking by as I bent over in very unladylike manner to put my boots back on. Thank yew for flying the friendly skies!
Let's skip past the part about getting to gate K17 only to be told that I needed to trek all the way back to gate K4, and how I tripped over one of those poles that hold the velvet ropes, and go right to boarding time. So there I was, sitting on the plane before takeoff, with my compulsive need to make unnecessary observations leading me to the rather morbid thought that the "first class" distinction is particularly ridiculous on an F-100 since it's not that much more spacious or comfortable than coach, and, let's face it, if there's a problem during the flight we're all going to bite it anyway, regardless of whether our seats are leather or polyester weave. I really need to train myself against getting into this frame of mind or perhaps partake of some strong barbituates before my next flight, because as we taxied out to the runway, the pilot suddenly announced that there was a problem with the plane requiring us to return to the gate. As it turned out, the "problem" was actually a "situation" involving the removal of a dark-skinned male passenger by a large grim-looking security official, followed by repeated searches of the aft lavatories by several visibly concerned security officials. According to the flight crew, the passenger in question did something at boarding time that made some of the airline personnel "uncomfortable". (I was sensing a lot of air quotes in the flight crew's explanation of things.) Rather than pull the guy aside right there at the gate, he was allowed to board the plane, where he apparently spent noteworthy time in the bathroom. Greeeeat.
Considering that I assume my standard flight persona, Princess Panic Attack, right about the time I step into the airport, I was not pleased by these events. Now, I have been on plenty of flights with annoying, weird, hygiene-optional and/or creepy people, but never have I been on a plane where the flight crew were so alarmed by a passenger that they had him removed. By the time the third security guy scurried down the aisle to the rear lavatories, I was debating the prudence of staying on the plane vs. standing up and demanding to disembark immediately. Finally deciding that causing a scene of any kind would not only get me removed from the plane as requested, but probably also detained and strip-searched under suspicion of being a complete freakin' psycho (even though anybody who caught my solo burlesque act at Security could attest to the fact that I wasn't even hiding things that should be concealed), I cinched my belt a little tighter, sweated a bit and hoped for the best.
And guess what? I made it to Minneapolis in one piece!
[Next post: notes and observations from St. Paul/Minneapolis]
# posted by Amanda at 9:36 PM |
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