Have you ever been put on the "No-Fly" list? Well, I think I came about as close as you can get to being added to that list after calling for a bag check on myself! As it turns out, TSA frowns upon this type of behavior occurring within the confines of the security screening area.
If you are reading these chapters out of order, then you probably have no idea what I'm talking about right now. Anyway, it’s important to know that I will be adding “bag check!” to my list of other things not to yell out within earshot of TSA. Of course it’s still not as bad as that one time I saw my buddy, Jack, and I said “hi” to him from the other side of the body scanner. Not good.
On with the story, shall we?
This particular morning was almost as much fun as the time I accidentally broke into the neighbor's house when we first moved to New Jersey. If you enjoyed that story, then you are sure to find this one amusing as well. I felt a disturbance in the force from the minute I lifted my head from my warm pillow in the early morning. I couldn’t place my finger on it, but I knew that there was more than just this desire to stay in bed, that was making my body feel too heavy to lift. I kind of did this strange half-roll out of bed and onto one knee, and then took a big breath and a stretch. Superstar! I have an ominous feeling about today. I was doing another turn-around trip to Utah, which is a treat, but that in itself wasn’t what was putting me off. Because of this strange feeling, I took extra care in packing for my trip. I made sure that I packed toothpaste for my toothbrush, instead of lotion. Yeah, I’ve messed that part up before. Hairbrush, razor, deodorant (VERY important)… I check each item off one at a time in my head and carefully ensure that each item is comfortably nestled into my suitcase immediately after I use them to prep for the long day ahead.
I left the house at 3am to catch a flight that gets me to Utah just in time for a meeting. I feel a little more confident about the trip now, having double checked my suitcase, and even remembering to bring the charger for my laptop this time. I was able to not only audit my bags, but I still have plenty of time before my flight. Even the large truck that cuts me off, just so it can sandblast my car with rocks, sand, and the occasional boulder, didn’t drown my spirits. In fact, I caught a glimpse of a butterfly flying by, and perhaps even a partial sighting of the endangered New Jersey Turnpike unicorn as I listen to anything but the kid’s songs on the radio.
Suddenly, I see nothing but red lights ahead of me. It had to be more than a mile of red tail lights. I zoom out of my dashboard GPS to see a red line of traffic leading the entire rest of the way to the airport. Now, I don’t plan for 3am traffic on my drive to the airport, so needless to say this throws a curve ball into my schedule. I get to where traffic is at a standstill, and begin inching along. There’s no “inches-per-hour” gauge on my car dashboard, so I’m fairly confident that I was going zero miles per hour. By doing the math in my head, I realize that if I’m going zero miles an hour, and I need to drive three more miles, it will take me infinity to get to the airport. The Greek god Concernicus said it best when he said, “This is troubling.” And so Concernicus I became, and I watch the GPS rack up the estimated time of arrival up to the time that my plane is supposed to be taking off. Well, that doesn’t work at all. Not unless the new teleport machine is working.
About forty-five minutes of driving at half-idle speed goes by, before traffic finally starts to ramp up to an incredible 10 miles-per-hour. I feel like I’m on the Autobahn at this point. It takes another 15 minutes for me to reach the source of the traffic snarl. One would assume I was going to see a five-car pileup, or a jack-knifed big rig spewing raw sewage or gasoline all over the entire Eastern half of Pennsylvania. As I pass the portion of the funneled freeway lanes, I see one guy digging into the middle of two lanes with a shovel, while 8 others supervise from a safe distance. Yes, a shovel. So as it turns out, Redbeard The Pirate over here decided he was going to dig up two lanes of the freeway to look for buried treasure while his fifteen supervisors cheer him on, and absolutely no one saw this as a problem.
I barely get to the airport with a half an hour to park and get through security. I grab a parking ticket from the machine that is the complete opposite of an ATM, and drive all the way to the top of the parking structure. Once at the very top, I frantically pull into the last available parking spot in all of Philadelphia. Wow, that was a close one! I can still do this. I get out of the car, and I reach for my wallet like a gunslinger so that I can file the parking ticket behind the two crisp one-dollar bills in my wallet. The only problem is, I don’t have my f####-ing wallet!!! Are you even kidding me? There’s no way I forgot my entire wallet. I completely tear my car apart, and there was no wallet. There is absolutely no chance that I’m making this flight. All of the air exhales from my lungs, and I struggle to pull a breath back in again. Defeated, I get back into the car and speed dial the travel department to try and book the next flight as I head for the parking exit to go home.
The drive back down the parking structure felt as though I was at least fifteen stories up. I cascade down the spiral parking ramp until I’m dizzy. Once I finally get to the parking exit, I feed my fresh parking ticket into the slot of the automated parking machine. What I expected to happen, was for the screen to display some sort of generic “have a nice day” message, and the metal arm to raise up and grant me freedom of the parking facility. I didn't get a "Have a nice day". Not at all. Instead, I found that my 5 minute extravaganza in the parking structure cost me $4. Let me remind you that I don’t have my wallet. I excuse myself from the call with the travel agent, because I obviously have no idea at this point if I will ever be getting out of this parking prison. I might have to sell my car.
After hanging up with the nice travel agent, I push the red button on the parking machine that says, “Help” since there is absolutely no doubt that I needed a little help this morning. A female robotic voice cuts in over the circa 1978 intercom, and I'm told to pull to the side and wait for the parking supervisor. Before I can even put the car in reverse, headlights pull up behind me. Really?? There’s like a thousand empty kiosks to get out of this airport, and this person needs to pull up right behind me? As soon as my backup lights make their presence known to Captain Leapfrog back there, I get a loud “HONK!” I roll down my window and yell, “You are going out the IN!” and I have no idea what that even means, but it worked. So Mr. Follow-The-Leader shifts himself in reverse, and somehow chooses from his thousand different exit options so that I can back up enough to pull off to the side and wait for the parking police.
Tick-Tock.... Gonna miss the next flight as well. I sit in the seat of my car and run through my options. Do I pretend that I’ve been mugged and had my wallet stolen? Do I stampede the security checkpoint? Do I report my car stolen? Do I just ram the flimsy parking arm like in the Dukes of Hazard? Do I start updating my resume? Do I sit in my car and cry? What is another word for Thesaurus? I was just spit-balling ideas, but these were all very viable solutions. So as I rev my engine to crash through the parking booth arm with tears rolling down my face and a half-updated resume typed up on my phone, I hear a knock on my window.
I jumped at the sound, and I see that the parking supervisor finally came to my car. I start rambling off my story as I’m rolling down the window, "I left my wallet at home. I just pulled into the garage and realized it, so I have to go home and get it so I can try and make the next flight." I tell her.
"No problem!" She said. "All I need is an ID".
"Well, my ID is in my wallet that I don't have." I say with an uncomfortable chuckle.
"Oh, then that's a problem" she says. “Let me see if there’s anything that we can do with this.”
She walks away into the darkness, and towards nothing in particular. Most people would argue that she wasn’t even walking in the general direction of anything that has to do with the airport, or the parking structure. It’s almost like she just said, “Screw this job!” and then just started walking off into the desert, or towards oncoming traffic on the nearby freeway. I think she eventually went down a manhole cover, or a revolving library wall after tugging on a specific book.
At this point I'm laughing. I wait while she leaves me to watch the minutes roll by on the clock on my dashboard. A call comes through on my phone, which startles me. The voice on the other end of the phone confirms my name, and then proceeds to tell me that there is a flight that boards in 25 minutes that is available, and this makes me laugh even more. The confused person on the receiving end of my madness suggests that I call back when it’s a better time for me, and leaves me with some reference number that I didn’t bother to write down.
In the shadows of the early morning, the parking supervisor again approaches my car. “So, there’s actually way too much paperwork for your kind of situation, so I’m going to have you go ahead and pull on up to this booth here, and we will force the ticket through for you.” It was a pity parking payment. I'm let out of the Philadelphia Airport parking structure for good behavior.
Now I'm back on the phone with the travel department while I'm driving home to get my elusive wallet. Have you ever had a quarter of a tank of gas in your car that somehow just completely disappears as you watch the gas gauge? Yup. Ever have that happen without your wallet? I tap on the Plexiglas that is in front of the gas gauge on my dash, like I've seen in so many movies where the pilot does this in an old airplane just to discover that the needle was stuck, and a full tank of gas emerges. No gas reappears, in fact, the needle dips below the "empty" line.
So without wanting to risk running out of gas on top of the rest of my great luck, I get off the freeway and pull into a gas station. As I’m looking for anything of value that I could sell, it turns out I had change at the bottom of my work bag. $1.83 to be exact. The look on the face of a gas attendant when you ask for $1.83 worth of gas at five in the morning is something you have to experience for yourself. I fuel up with nearly a full gallon of gas, and I’m driving back down a long stretch of dark road. I pass several cars that are pulled off to the side of the road by local police, and I realize the only way to make this morning more s####-y than it already is, would be to be pulled over with no driver’s license. So I carefully drive the speed limit because I have no identification, and absolutely no money in which to bribe a cop with. Just kidding about that part, I was not driving the speed limit. I was in a hurry.
And I'm back on the phone yet again with the travel department, trying to book a flight. After navigating the additional fees, and being put on hold several times, we finally come to an agreement. "You are all set", she says. Finally something goes right this morning. "I just need the security code from the credit card that you booked with."
I start laughing like a mental patient. Now if it were any of my other credit cards, I could probably tell her what the security code was, but this card I had no idea. So I take a guess "0001?". She puts me on hold and comes back to tell me it didn't go through. "0002?” I ask. We both knew what I was doing, and it was the stupidest thing I'd done in at least the last 20 minutes.
“Sir, I can’t keep…”
“I know. I know. Look, I’m almost home. Do you think you could hold on the line until I can get home to my wallet? I have a feeling that if I call back, I won’t be able to get you back on the line, and all of these arrangements will be lost.”
She held on the line for 15 more minutes until I got home to run in and get my wallet. Small talk for that long of a stretch with ANYONE is awkward enough, but imagine what that looks like with an American Express Travel Agent! She asked how my day was going. We both laughed. We talked about my kids, and my crazy travel adventures. This conversation kept my mind off of being fired, or incurring airline fees, or rearranging the rest of my day, or my unfinished presentation that I now have no time to work on. My sincerest apologies for anyone on hold with American Express travel at 5am this morning due to unexpected wait times... that was all me.
I got my wallet from the house and ran back outside into the dark, when a praying mantis decided to jump on my neck as though it had been waiting to pounce on the next person to walk out of the garage. This huge mutant praying mantis first gets me in a half of a choke hold, and then falls down my shirt. My shirt was tucked in, effectively trapping him against my skin. I screamed like a high school girl at a Justin Bieber concert. The lady on the phone thought I had just gotten into a car accident. As I untucked my shirt to free the mantis, I could feel him inching below my waistline and into my pants, searching for an escape route. I dropped my phone on the driveway, and a permanent spiderweb screensaver instantly appeared. Looks like I can add a visit to the Apple Store to my agenda. The Mantis escaped unharmed in the chaos.
I managed to book the next flight out and thought that the morning shenanigans were over. Then I hit the traffic caused by the freeway treasure hunt that was still happening. Only now, it was about 2 miles further back! So guess what? I missed the next flight too!
Something is trying to keep me out of Utah, other than my own free will. Once I finally reached the airport with my wallet, I ended up booking a third flight to Utah in one morning. No one should ever book that many flights to Utah. Not even people that live there would book three flights to Utah in one morning. As we begin boarding the flight, I hope that the praying mantis is a good luck sign. I also hope that all those aboard these two flights that I missed all make it safely to Utah, because something was definitely trying to keep me off those planes. And lastly, I hope that everyone that sees me walk into the meeting two hours late will be okay with the fact that I’m already exhausted at 10:30 in the morning. It's been a long day.
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