The day started out like any other day, with high hopes and low expectations. Little did I know, today would end up being a complete shit show, with me having a front row seat in the VIP section. No, I take that back, I would end up being the star of the show.
Today was supposed to be a simple trip in and out of Utah, for a routine review of operations, and a light spattering of meetings. We were just a week away from Christmas, so at this point you kind of ride the wave of retail and hold on tight. I woke up at 2:30am, and was out the door by 3:30am after packing lunch for my son and making sure that our ####-ing shelf elf, and snow dog and magic shelf reindeer had flown back to the North Pole and returned in a different hiding spot during the night while the kids are asleep. If a shelf penguin has the nerve to show up at our house next, it will be forever hiding in the ashes of a lit fireplace. I think for the next few years, Santa will require the Elf, Dog and Reindeer to work in Santa’s Workshop all through Christmas due to the challenging job market. It’s not like the Elf keeps our kids on their best behavior anyway. They will typically come downstairs, get excited that they found everybody, and less than 5 minutes later they are kicking each other in the knee caps over a toy that no one has played with in 2 years, Perhaps I just tell the kids that Santa now has the capability to watch all children by hacking into Alexa. He knows when you are sleeping, he knows what’s in your internet browser history.
The drive to the Philly airport took about 20 minutes longer than usual, since there was some road work happening on the freeway. Someone must have been reading my blog about the massive pot holes on I-95. It’s the little victories that keep me fighting the good fight. I arrived at the airport, and found rockstar parking right next to the elevator leading to the airport security gate. Wait a minute. Roads are being fixed AND I end up with a prime parking spot? Either I should run for Governor, or perhaps just run. Run far away from the airport, and whatever the travel gods have in store for me. But I didn’t run. The curiosity of what awaited for me just through those dented metal elevator doors convinced me to push forward with giddy anticipation. Am I manifesting my own travel adventure?
The smell of fresh Philadelphia filth was euphorically urinated within the elevator that I stepped into. It was as though it was waiting specifically and patiently for me, a magical entryway to shenanigans and ridiculousness. I held my breath all the way to the first floor, and was promptly greeted by not fresh air as the doors opened to the gates of hell. No matter how many times I walk the green mile of the Philadelphia Airport, I still find myself gazing in astonishment of the achievements of the world’s shittiest airport. It’s a sadistic fascination, no doubt similar to being part of a guided tour of Jeffrey Dahmer’s house. The level of effort needed to remain at the top of the list of shittiest airports is impressive and legendary.
As I turn the corner, I see the line for TSA backed up to the end of the walkway bridge, which floated above the snarl of motionless vehicle traffic below. The honking of Uber drivers and irritated relatives echoed through our glass hamster trail. Middle fingers were expressed with such energy, that they could be distinctly heard from up above as well. The City of Brotherly Love. My two boys are constantly at each other’s throats at home, so the saying is somewhat fitting. I quickly noticed that the line I was standing in was not moving. Panic was lofting though the air, but I have become intimately familiar with the inefficiencies of PHL, so I have to say that I wasn’t terribly worried that my plane was about to begin boarding in the next fifteen minutes. A young woman a few people ahead of me, wearing bunny slippers, complained about the airport in a heavy British accent. My English isn’t very good, but she said something about “Perhaps these chaps could loft the security gates so we could tally ho”, or something like that. Perhaps indeed. Yes, why are the gates down? I look down at my boarding pass and notice that it shows my flight departing from Gate C, and I was waiting at B. It never seemed to matter before, but I guess it does now, old bean!
Rather than take the journey of sadness to Terminal C, I remain committed to B. I watched as the gates were raised, and the invaders charged forward. The line flows quickly. Almost too quickly. As my body is scanned in the XL 5000 Body Scanning Image Radio Wave Detection Device System Module, a series of “problem areas” populate around my lungs, a fairly important organ of the body. The female working the XL 5000 Body Scanning Image Radio Wave Detection Device System Module, and her male backup both pause their conversation with each other, and I’m told to hold for about half a millisecond. “Okay, you’re fine” said the chap, and he continues right along with the conversation he was having with the lassie.
“Am I fine?” I thought to myself. “What about these unexplained problem areas?” I couldn’t decide what concerned me more, the fact that I just got waved through to board a plane full of passengers with these highlighted problem areas without so much as a pat down, or the fact that I could potentially be riddled with who knows what throughout my lungs. After a quick search on Web MD, I determined I wasn’t a threat to anyone on the plane, but I could unfortunately either have a common chest cold, or the plague. The standout symptoms were the feelings of tiredness, dragging along baggage, paranoia and anxiety. I checked all of those boxes. The only other possible explanation would be that my daughter had gotten into my Post-It note stash while swimming through the dirty laundry upstairs.
It’s 4:30am, and my plane just began the boarding process. To my dismay, the Starbucks on the way to my gate was closed. I quickly posted a petition on Change.org to make it illegal to have closed coffee shops in an open airport terminal. I managed to find a grab-and-go coffee shop directly across from my gate, and asked for a Cappuccino. “Sorry, the machines are still warming up, but we have these fresh coffees in a can.” What an oxymoron…the can, I mean. I took this conciliation prize, and waited for boarding group 83 to be called.
My group is called, and I walk down the corridor and leave my roller bag at the end of the jetway, just as I was instructed. I board the plane and find my aisle seat. I’m not sure why I choose the aisle over the window, since I have a serious fear of people placing their heavy bags in the overhead just above me as I’m sitting. Seriously, have you ever watched people try to do things? Things are hard to do, and there are consequences. A gentleman attempts haphazardly to swing his bag up above me with his other hand full, and luckily the wheel catches the ledge and keeps me from being knocked into a coma. I help him cram the bag into the bin, and he continues walking towards the back of the plane.
We have a pretty rocky takeoff because of all of the heavy morning winds we were having. It was one of those takeoffs where the plane is just a few feet into liftoff, hovering for a bit and swaying side to side so much that you think they might just put us back down and try it again. Just when I think we are about out of runway, we catch a cross wind, and the plane faced into it, projecting us straight up like a kid pulling a kite string on a windy beach. Are we in space? Easy Maverick, this is a commuter flight! Not everyone here can handle a 7 G-Force takeoff. Within about 12 seconds, we were at like 4,000,000 feet.
I can’t sleep on airplanes, but I can be sleep…ish? This is a kind of in and out of consciousness thing that includes dozing off, and results in not getting any real rest and also not getting anything constructive done. Sounds like all the makings of success, doesn’t it? So I reach for my fresh canned coffee, and give it a vigorous shake to mix all the chunky coffee sludge that I imagined had settled at the bottom of the can. At $6.50 a pop, I doubted that their inventory cycled out very often.
As I pull back the tab on the can… “PFSSSSSSHHHHHHHHFFFFFF!”. Fun fact, I didn’t read anyplace on the can that it was extremely carbonated, so you can imagine my surprise when I opened this thing after vigorously shaking it in a pressurized cabin at 4,000,000 feet! Free coffee for everyone that was within three rows of me… in both directions. I panicked and did my best to contain the blast, but it was seriously like a fire hose. The harder I tried to cover it with my hands, the further it shot out at everyone. The woman diagonal to me on the aisle was snickering at first, and then the secondary coffee blast kicked in, and the spray covered her face as we made eye contact. Her smile was washed away with a precision stream of foaming coffee. Every visible head swiveled in my direction. I think I heard someone yell, “Stop it!” but I’m not sure. Of course, they all think I’m doing this on purpose! I was sitting in my seat with a carbonated beverage, then suddenly and inexplicably, I shake up the can and shower everyone with coffee. What an asshole.
For a split second, I thought maybe I should pretend to be enthusiastically celebrating something, like I had a winning lottery ticket, or I was in a Super Bowl locker room or something. I tried putting my mouth over it, as though I had a chance to ingest the eruption of caffeinated vengeance, but it just ended up shooting violently out of my nose. There’s nothing like a sea of angry faces looking back at you as you involuntarily shoot sticky beverages at them out of your nose for a good solid 2 minutes. I tried not to make eye contact with anyone, as not to give the perception that I was specifically targeting anyone in particular. But out of my peripheral, I could see people of all different backgrounds, women, men, children… even a dog or two throwing a variety of looks at me from anger to sadness, surprise to bewilderment and everything in between.
As the can fizzled out like and expired firework, there was this painfully awkward silence. I felt as though the entire plane was watching me. Should I go all in and hold up the can and say something lighthearted like, “anyone care for this last sip?” I remember waiting to be choked out by an Air Marshall. I’m surprised (and dare I say… disappointed) that I wasn’t immediately banned from American Airlines today.
There is so much coffee in my shoe that I make a squishing sound when I walk. And it’s nose coffee in my shoe. I’m completely soaked, and I still had 4 hours of the flight to go. The seat belt sign is still lit, so no one is able to get up and clean themselves off. The call button lights are all lighting up like a Christmas tree all throughout the plane, as people desperately search for napkins.
It’s not even possible that there was so much coffee in that little can! It was like a portal was opened to a coffee ocean on coffee planet. Everyone’s luggage below us was going to be drenched in coffee. My bag was down there also. I sat for the next four hours in cold coffee, and my pants were starting to stick to me. I was already cutting the meeting close, and now I would have to change clothes after I get my bag out of baggage claim. I won’t even have a chance to do that until after my connection in Dallas. That’s right, I get to sit in soggy pants for the next four hours, and then again for a couple of hours on the flight from Dallas to Utah. I’m also pretty sure that I ruptured my sinus cavity, and everything is going to smell and taste like coffee for the rest of my life. People on this flight want to fight me. It’s not even 6am yet, and it was a very long day already. The worst part, I never did get to have my coffee.
I spent the next four hours uncomfortably apologizing to anyone that would look in my direction. By the time we landed in Dallas, the knee of my left pant leg, the one that sustained the most damage, had begun to crystallize in a stiff coffee cocoon around my leg. My underwear was damp, and I was sticking to the seat. The plane smelled like a coffee shop had vomited after a rough night of partying.
We somehow landed in Dallas 30 minutes early. I blame the coffee portal. The pilot got on the intercom and explained that we were so early, that there were no gates open for us. We continued to sit, and the pilot explained that we were just waiting for another plane to pull out of a different gate, but by doing that, we gave up our original gate. We were no longer early. By the time we pulled into this other gate, there wasn’t much time to make it to my connection.
As passengers collected their belongings to exit the plane, just about every person took a moment to survey the coffee damage. I received the expected dirty looks from everyone around me, as the reality of them heading off to their own meetings and life responsibilities while covered in dried up coffee, had settled in. I followed the angry mob off the plane, and I remember thinking that there would inevitably be a passenger or two waiting for me off the plane to scream at me, or dump their own beverage on me, or worse. Luckily everyone decided not to waste their time on sweet revenge this morning. I think the late arrival of the plane might have saved my life.
The connection to the next flight was tight, and I was briskly speed walking like an uncomfortable robot. My left pant leg continued hardening. I managed to make it to the gate as they were calling my boarding group. The flight to Utah was pretty uneventful, and we even arrived a little early. I had a few familiar coffee-soaked passengers on my flight, and had overheard some of the recanting of the story of the mad coffee attacker. I think there was some exaggeration in their retelling of the story, since I don’t recall standing up with the can and running up and down the aisles screaming obscenities. Whatever.
After getting off the plane, I made my way to baggage claim to get my bag. I couldn’t wait to change out of these crunchy clothes. I watched as person after person pulled their bags from the carousel. Then I watched as the passengers from another flight did the same. As the last bag from that cycle popped out of the mystery tunnel, I began walking over to the baggage claim customer service desk like a pirate with a crusty coffee pant peg leg. To my surprise, the customer service representative was extremely helpful. That last sentence scored 11 on a sarcasm scale of 1 to 10.
“Looks like your bag didn’t make your connection” She said very matter of fact.
“That’s what it’s looking like. Any idea of where the bag might be?”
“There’s a good chance that it made it on the next flight, which will arrive here in a couple of hours. What I can do is get your phone number, and we can call you when it arrives, and even deliver it to your hotel if you are in the area.”
So at this point, I’m super excited to show up at the meeting today in coffee pants. It’s a very rustic, early American look. Not to mention the fact that I was now late for the meeting. And to top it off, I didn’t have much confidence that anyone really knew where my bag was.
When I arrived at the office for the meeting, I was met with the usual, “So, how was your flight?” I decided this time to share my adventure with the team, if for no other reason than to explain to them why I look as though I just crawled out of the dumpster behind Starbucks. I recreated the coffee incident for them, and people were cringing and laughing. I was then brought from office to office to share the story, and my audience continued to grow, some people hearing the story three or four times. For as exhausting and frustrating as my travel karma can sometimes be, I’m glad that it can bring at least a little bit of joy to others.
I got a phone call later in the afternoon that my bag had been found, and delivered to my hotel. I half expected it to be someone else’s bag when I got to my room, but it was actually my bag, and it was completely intact. The next day, as I packed for my return flight home, I was sure that I wouldn’t have anything happen that could match the coffee incident. I couldn’t have been more wrongerer…er. Super wrong. (Queue loud buzzer sound)
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