MrNepathy's Blog

I’m a firm believer in the guideline to get to the airport two hours before a flight. It’s a pain and often means a lot of sitting around bored, but I like the peace of mind that comes from everything being handled so I can sit back, enjoy an overpriced coffee and watch something I’ve watched a dozen times before. So I arrived at the airport almost two hours early and got into the short lines for Midwest. Rather than having the long snaked path through retractable straps, Midwest had arranged it into six or seven short lines that each led to a kiosk. It was the Tuesday before Christmas, so naturally they were short staffed and some of the kiosks were broken. The guy behind was on his way to New York and then on to Saudi Arabia. His flight was at 7:25 and mine was at 8:30. Despite being the next person in line for about fifteen minutes, I hadn’t moved due to various problems.

Apparently the thing to do when there are multiple lines is to separate your entire party and have everyone stand in a line then shout back and forth. They try to coordinate to all come together at the end. One woman was flying with her mother and had ordered the ticket for her mother, so she wanted to do her own kiosk stuff, then go over to help her mother at a different kiosk. You know a great tip for merging into one party from multiple lines? Don’t get in multiple lines. That wasn’t the only group that did this. There were at least three others that did.

I talked to the guy behind me. He was born in the U.S. but his parents were from Saudi Arabia. We were talking about security and he said he always ran into problems, like when he was going to Germany with his UWM engineering class. Security saw him coming out of the terminal, pulled him out of the crowd and asked him various questions. As time ebbed away he got more worried about his flight so I told him to go ahead of me. I had a bit more time and he was running out of it. He reluctantly agreed. The kiosk in front of us wasn’t working and when he stood at it, people started to take it out on him, asking him why he wasn’t using it, telling him he was holding up the line, etc. People had explained no less than five times that the kiosk wasn’t working, but still people were irritated. Another woman had a 7:15 flight and it was already approaching 6:45. When she told someone in my line this, the woman in my line snapped, “well you should have been here sooner.” True, she probably should have been, but the roads were somewhat slippery that day and traffic was slow going. How hard is compassion really? The 7:15 woman asked the 7:25 guy if she could go ahead. He was in a huge hurry of his own, but he agreed to let her go first. The grumpy woman turned out to be on my flight. She had all the time in the world.

My return flight had its own problems.

As it’s winter and I live in the Midwest, I try to avoid flying through cities like Detroit and St. Louis on my way to or back from Florida. It’s bad enough that my trip begins and ends with Milwaukee where the weather looks like we’re in a giant slow globe stuck in a paint-mixing machine. So instead I planned my trip through Atlanta, which is apparently one of the busiest airports in the world. I equate this to New Moon setting a box office record its opening weekend. Just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s good.

On the trip down to Jacksonville, everything went smoothly. I left the plane in Atlanta, asked the agent at the desk where to grab my flight to Jacksonville and though there was a mix up with flight numbers, I was pointed in the right direction. The tram, which I’m pretty sure passed through the planetary core, took me quickly to my concourse. I found my gate and everything was golden. That’s because my flight from Atlanta to Jacksonville was through Delta, which is apparently to Atlanta what Shinra is to Midgar (Google it if you have to).

For the trip home, I flew Delta from Jacksonville to Atlanta and Midwest from Atlanta to Milwaukee. That’s where I ran into problems. As I got off of the plane in Atlanta I looked for the agent at the desk. The line was rather long and as our plane had been delayed, many of the passengers were in a hurry to find their connecting flight. So I figured I could ask any of the other dozen agents. I figured wrong.

Before I failed at that however, I went to the big board of flights because I prefer finding stuff myself to asking someone when the answer should be obvious. It wasn’t obvious. At the BBOF I saw three flights to Milwaukee. None of them were my flight. The list took up eight or ten screens and my flight was nowhere to be found. At first I thought maybe it’s because my flight was still four hours away and only the more immediate flights were shown, but there were a few after mine. Then I thought maybe my 5:00 flight was changed to 5:16 due to delays, but the airline and flight number were all wrong. That’s when I surrendered to my impulse to ask a desk agent and we return to my “I figured wrong” statement.

The agent looked at my boarding pass and then looked at me as if I had just slapped her across the face and threatened to kill Santa Claus. “Sir, this isn’t a Delta flight, so you’ll have to ask someone else.” Right because why would Delta know anything about the boarding pass that has Delta printed on it fifteen times? So I wandered the corridors of the Atlanta airport. Every board I found listed only Delta flights, and flights from Delta partners. Every concourse had Delta on it more times than an ancient Greek textbook chapter on acceleration. Another Delta person told me Midwest was either in Concourse C or D which is like saying, “It’s either in St. Petersburg or Moscow” because both are huge and they’re far from one another. Concourse D is actually in Memphis.

Finally I found a security person roaming the halls. I can only assume she was flying on a non-Delta flight as well. I stopped her to ask where the Midwest gate was and she said, “Concourse D.” Back to the tram. It’s at this point that I hired a Sherpa. I walked from the first gate of D to the last gate of D, because well, I had that kind of time. At the very end of D I escaped Delta’s grip and found Air Trans, which was of course, also not my airline. But it was proof that other airlines existed. I almost booked a trip to Toronto just on the hope that I could get some help there.

The Air Trans section of Atlanta airport is very strange. The seats are different from the seats in the rest of the airport, the monitors show greetings in various languages and all of the people are asleep. They have a look on their face that suggests joy and greatness are fleeting thoughts, faint and distant like what’s left of a December sidewalk snowflake once August has arrived. Some remnant molecule might remain, but it has transformed from solid to liquid then liquid to mostly gas, and it has been tread upon and soiled. Even if it were not invisible to the human eye it is now filthy to the point of being unrecognizable. It has succumbed to the dirt that it now inhabits, surrendered its identity in order to survive as some greater, misshapen thing. Such is hope in the Atlanta Air Trans section of the airport. I was surprised not to run into Tom Hanks sleeping there in order to hide from INS.

So I wandered back through for another pass. It’s at this point that I sat down at a random seat at what looked like a student lounge to enjoy the Goldfish crackers in my backpack. I watched a little Dave Chappelle, ate a few crackers and checked my boarding pass to see if it held any clues. It was then that I looked over my shoulder towards the only section of wall in the airport that didn’t have a lighted sign or television monitor and saw the Midwest logo. No one was behind the counter and the only sign was a laminated photocopy that said, “Flight numbers on your pass might not match actual flight numbers.” Super.

So I watched an entire movie on my MP3 player and looked over at the counter again. No one. I got up and wandered around until I found a Continental desk.  The agent there was looking at the computer for literally about a minute before acknowledging me. Then she looked up and said, “Do you have a question?” “Not really, I just wanted to say I love your complimentary breakfasts,” is what I wanted to say. Instead, I said, “Is there an information desk around here? I have a question about a different airline and there doesn’t seem to be any information about non-Delta flights.” She told me that Midwest is always Gate D7, which is where I had been, and that someone would show up about an hour before the flight. Keep in mind, my flight still wasn’t shown on any board that I could find in the airport.

Armed with that knowledge, I returned to my spot, sat down and enjoyed some music. It was about half an hour before the flight that someone showed up. Two people showed up: one in Frontier green and one in Midwest blue. When the line was gone I approached the desk where they were sorting through tags.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Yes?” the Midwest woman asked, “Is this about Frontier?”

“No, I just have a quick question about my flight.”

“We’ll answer it after the flight from Frontier is handled. Please sit down sir.”

Yes, sorry to interrupt your busy tag piling with my crazy attempt to find out if my flight exists.

Tuesday I said on Twitter “Airports are to kindness what Ysalamari are to the Force.” I stick by that.