Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

It's stuck in my head.

I'm stuck at an airport. An appropriate bookend to this trip. On the last, and unnecessary (let's fly you south to then fly you north so that your ticket is a couple hundred dollars cheaper) leg of my journey home, I spent hours on the plane.
I spent more time on the plane waiting than I spent in the air flying.

I sat there while they had a mechanic trying to fix some problem that was "only going to delay us 5 minutes." After an hour, we had to get off. The airline had to get another plane, so we waited. We waited a long time, and then they found one that for some reason had to park on the other side of the airport. So, we stopped waiting, and started walking. We started walking really fast, because "we didn't have much time" before the new plane boarded.

So, we got on that plane and a curious thing happened. We started waiting again. A long time. As it turns out, if we had taken off on that plane, the landing gear wouldn't have come down, and that would have been a problem. (Or so they say.)

Well, I had a connecting flight. After a few hours and changing planes, and waiting inside the airport, only to move and wait inside the plane, a smart girl like me starts to thinkin!

"Uhm- excuse me sir. Since I'm missing my connecting flight due to all this engine failure/mechanical failure shenanigans, can we just skip the flight south only to fly back north and stick me on a flight straight home?"

He said no problem, except that I checked a bag. And, since I'm changing carriers in Florida, I'll have to go get my bag off of the claim belt and recheck it with the new carrier.

"Are you sure about that? I think that they checked my bag through to the final destination."

I asked a couple of times. I asked a couple of people. Same answer, same justification.

So, I thought, "Well damn! Good thing this happened, because I never knew that I had to transfer my bag myself." So, I got down to Florida just in time to get down to the baggage claim, and wait for a long ass time, only to find that I had no bag, and no one could tell me where it was.

The last flight out had departed 2 hours ago, and the woman working the luggage service office had the attitude of someone who had endured 8 hours of people yelling at her, and she was ready to go home. My problem was not her problem, and she tried to explain to me why the airline wasn't at fault, and they wouldn't do anything for me.

Do white people endure weeks like this? I mean really, if I hadn't gone to seminary and worked through the meaning of life, love, pain, and the limitations of our perceptions, I would be completely embittered and maybe in jail for having concocted some "Burn Baby Burn!!" scheme. Either that or I would have just kirked out one day, and the shit would have ended in tragedy.

Seminary and the God-shit really smoothed me out. And now? A bitch is just too damn old to be goin to jail on some bullshit. More than once muthafukas have called security on my Black ass!

So, I've had to learn/am still learning that I need to talk to people in a way that gets me what I want. I don't need this lady in luggage services to know how angry and frustrated I am. I don't need her to know what I think of her and this whole situation. What I need is a room. So, I figured out how to talk to her so that I got a room and a couple of meal vouchers.

Now, to be clear, this trick-ass bitch didn't do shit for me that she wasn't suppose to do. Nothing. I got what was coming to me. But, what I got was far more than she wanted to give me when I walked in at 8:50 pm, and all of the folks who would have otherwise helped me were gone for the evening.

I got a room. I got Florida sushi for dinner, which was delicious, and about the best thing I've had in the last 4 days. My room is right down the hall from the gym, so I'm gonna go run off this frustration/excess energy.

Oh, and my bag? I'm looking at it right now. The new carrier had it. It was checked through to my final destination. They had to pull it off the plane.