The Fiend-ly Skies

Air travel just ain’t what it used to be.

Last night, I knew something was up when a flight attendant snapped at a woman who needed something a few rows back. “Ask the other one. I have a job to do.” I felt a gust of wind as she wheeled the cart by me. She was definitely in a hurry, although I was a little confused about where her other job was.

Things had been going so well. Without spending a dime, I have somehow landed on what appears to be the opposite of a watch list, and more often than not there’s a TSA pre-✔︎ notation on my boarding pass. At rush hour on a Thursday evening, that’s huge. Like royalty, I breezed past the mile long line of regular folk snaking slowly toward security, and without touching a bin or removing my laptop or taking off my boots or my jacket I was through to the other side. Sometimes I appreciate being not worth a second look.

We had made up for our plane’s late arrival at the gate with a swift and uneventful loading process. Everyone obeyed the repeated warnings from the ticket agent, and nobody dared sneak through before their group number was called. I feigned patience as I held my position near the ropes, reassuring myself that even though there were at least ten precious and semi-precious metal groups before mine, Group 2 was still like winning the lottery for overhead bin space.

And then, we waited. Twenty minutes past the pull back time, belted in and ready for the dulcet rumble of wheels on the runway, we hadn’t moved. That’s when the flight attendant whose smile had seemed so genuine when I boarded let loose on the woman a few rows back and propelled the cart up the aisle in a death defying rush to nowhere.

Then came the perky voice on the intercom, explaining the delay. I hoped it wasn’t anything serious, like the hydraulic system, or a broken wing. Or a faulty oxygen mask in the cockpit, which is what happened when my mom and brother were flying to Chicago last month, and I could not believe they were holding up a flight just so the pilot could have a working oxygen mask.

It was worse than I thought. In row 27, a guy’s reading light was out. No wonder the pretty flight attendant with the fake smile was feeling a bit homicidal. The work order had been filled out, and the mechanics were on the way. To fix one guy’s reading light in row 27. Everyone within a five row radius offered to switch seats with him. He declined. The flight attendant who was not quite yet in a murderous rage offered him a little pen light. He snarled. The intercom crackled again. It would be another hour before the mechanics could arrive. Somebody, a rare person with a brain, made an executive decision. The doors were locked, and we prepared, again, for takeoff. Everybody was happy. Except the guy in row 27.

I felt a little guilty later in the flight when I finally gave up on sleep and reached up to turn on my fully functioning reading light. I felt downright terrified when I accidentally pressed the flight attendant call button instead. Thankfully I caught it before the scary one with the fake smile could send the cart hurtling up the aisle to slice off my toes.

The good thing about arriving really late when your flight was already going to be one of the last flights in is the swift exit, a perfect matching bookend to my TSA pre✔︎. And I still have all my toes. Things could be a lot worse.