Loyal Scaiaholics will recall my penchant for writing blogs on planes. I went back to work today after spending a few days with the family back in Dayton.
This was a trip that morphed in several different directions. My brothers, mom and me had originally planned to see the new Jurassic World film together as a family. I was excited at the end of the last one, which [spoilers] ended with a dinosaur looking menacingly out over a city.
“How will they get out of this?!” society wondered, gasping in unison.
Instead, though, reviewers warned us they reduced the dinosaurs taking over the world to a montage of news clips because, apparently, we’d rather hear about locusts.
#MamaScaia put an end to this ruckus, though, suggesting we see a Neil deGrasse Tyson show in Dayton instead. He talked about what movies get right and wrong about science. While “skipping dinosaur fights to talk about locusts” is absolutely what’s wrong with the movie industry, Jurassic World didn’t make his speech.
But enough about dinosaurs. The saga of this trip to Dayton begins, as sagas often do, at DFW Airport. The Secretary of Health and Human Services was coming to celebrate the arrival of 110,000 pounds of baby formula.
“That’s perfect,” I thought to myself. “They’re scheduled to land three hours before my flight, so I’ll already be there. No way this story will take three hours to produce.”
But I forgot about the pageantry of baby formula deliveries.
I found myself in a rush when I moved from the FedEx complex to the remote lot. The bus driver even offered to go out of order and go to straight Terminal B first since I was the only person onboard [Unless she was violating policy by doing that. If so, DFW Airport, she most certainly did not stop at terminals out of order. If she wasn’t violating policy, please pass along my thanks].
And instead of filing stories from DFW Airport, I found myself editing on the plane. A flight attendant even yelled at me to turn down the doggone interview on my computer [It’s possible she neither yelled nor used the term, “doggone.”]. My brother and I had coordinated trips, so when he came from LA, we were on the same flight from DFW. After everything society has decided to put flight attendants through the past two years, he handed me his headphones to shut me up.
For the flight back to DFW, since airlines are still dealing with staffing issues while TSA could see a record number of passengers this summer, American asked if I wanted to sign up for standby because they were overbooked and people will do anything to get out of Ohio.
I needed to get back to work today, but at the same time, no harm in putting in an excessively high bid, I thought to myself.
Sitting at the gate with my brother, they called me up and accepted my hilariously unreasonable bid, saying I’d get $1,200 and they could still get me on a flight from Dayton to DFW that afternoon.
“You were the only one who signed up when we were overbooked,” the agent explained. But then they said the guy flying standby in my place got held up on the shuttle bus, so I’d make this flight after all.
“We’ll be glad to set you up with another boarding pass,” the agent said.
“Since we were offering him so much money, he might have been looking forward to staying put,” the agent next to her posited. Correctly, I might add.
Because everyone decided to take a trip this summer, when we landed at DFW, we waited on the tarmac about half an hour for a gate. We were then sent to Gate B-approximately-586. Then we had to wait for the jet bridge, so even the Bluths are understaffed.
But TSA was quick to get me through security when I was late for my flight out, and DFW’s bus drivers were willing to bend the rules to get me to the checkpoint quickly. Even though they’re busy [and even though some of us, and I’m not naming names here, show up at the last minute], they’re still trying to get everyone where they need to go.
I can understand why they post signs on the buses to let people know they don’t just kneel down in the face of conflict. Or they mean they only lower the platform by request. Whichever.
