FlightPain

1:25pm - Austin Time
2:25pm – Detroit Time
12:25pm – Denver Time

Flying is weird. I still think humans weren’t really ever meant to fly. I’d like to quote Douglas Adams here: “The knack to flying lies in throwing yourself at the ground and missing”. Planes are just about as reliable as that.

Yesterday, I was supposed to fly out from Austin to Detroit. I wanted to start at 2.00pm, and I did. But of course, everything went wrong. There was an accident on I-35 that slowed down traffic terribly; the check-in lines were super long; I was fined for my luggage being overweight; and I was “randomly selected” for extra special screening.

I like how things in the US are disguised so expertly...absolutely nasty meat is covered in all sorts of sauces, salad is rabbit food without the dressing, you see signs such as ‘Want to have an exciting career as a State Trooper? Apply here!’ everywhere, all the time. The attendant behind the desk looked at me, smiled, and said ‘You’ve been selected for extra screening!’ as he handed me my boarding pass. He might have been saying ‘You’ve been selected as the winner of our $40000000000 award!’

It was already 10 minutes past my boarding time, but I went through the rigorous screening process. They scanned my luggage, and asked me to go and stand between glass partitions (which were possibly bullet-proof). Finally, a security-officer approached me and went into a diatribe of airline safety policies, and telling me exactly what she was about to do. She struck me as a Don’t-mess-with-me-‘coz-I’m-so-professional kind of person, although the way she delivered her speech reminded me forcefully of Shakespeare. ‘Are there any sensitive or injured parts of your body that I need to made aware of?’ she said at last.

I looked at her and shrugged. ‘I’m ticklish’.

I’m sure she was laughing when she patted me down.

The rest of the procedure was uninteresting. I sat in a relatively comfortable seat, looking bored, while they went through my bags. I was annoyed; they were, after all, unpacking my carefully over-stuffed bags, bags that I had to almost sit on so that I could zip them. Afterwards, when they were done, they cunningly left certain items outside my bags, so that I could wrestle with the closing ceremony again. Bah.

When I got to my gate, the flight had been cancelled.

I got another ticket for today, which I didn’t mind. I got my fine-money back; I discovered that I could take a full-extra suitcase with me; I cooked something real for myself for the first time in my life; and I watched ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ again.

My friend Ammar, the biggest airplane-buff to be found in a radius of 7 miles, asked me if I needed a ride to the airport, because he loves driving, loves watching cars at the airport, loves the airport, and loves watching planes flying over the highways that lead to the airport. I figured he preferred doing a good deed over studying hopelessly for a pending exam. I also figured I’d be doing him a favor if I asked him for a ride.

Today, I was ‘randomly selected’ for a special screening again. This time, I was ready. While they went through my bags, I read. It would have been extra-fun if I had been reading ‘The Inscrutable Americans’.

On my flight, a little 2-year-old kid sitting in the seat behind me screamed and kicked at my seat the whole way. I got back at him by falling asleep. While de-boarding, a passenger pointedly remarked (so that everybody on the plane heard him), ‘what a well-behaved kid!’

I got a really cool picture of clouds on my flight from Denver to Detroit (Shown above). It was the sort of picture that reminded me of the very first sentence that introduced me to similes and metaphors…"the clouds were marshmallows in the sky".