Some Days the Bear Eats You

What fun. The plane breaks, so after waiting on the runway for two hours, one of us snaps. It's a lady's voice coming from the front of the plane and she's gone full blown nutso. The kind of nuts that, if it was a man, you'd put up your guard because the mayhem was right around the corner. All we could do was hope that the stewardess had some sort of crisis training. Only, ooops! it was the stewardess that had lost control, and she reached the spluttering point, spitting out syllables so fast that none of them had even a chance of coming together with another and forming any kind of coherent thought. At one point I thought she was trying to say something like "finding the biscuit bastard the damdamdamdam," but who knows?

I know what got to her. I had even commented on it before it happened, because back when I was flying all the time, I had seen it several times. When the first announcement came that we might be out here awhile, I said to the kid, "watch, now we're going to go all Lord of the Flies." And sure enough, when things don't go as planned, the passengers for some reason toss the rule book out onto the runway. They started standing in the aisle. One lady put her foot up on the armrest. People were milling around, ignoring the stewardesses, talking loud, and pulling their stowed luggage. And most likely some very important businessman demanded to be let off the plane. Thing is, he picked the wrong stewardess. And, being the straw that broke the camel's back, was rewarded with insane cackling jibber-jabber.

Shortly thereafter, we taxied back to the gate and were shuffled off to comped hotels, in order to get up tomorrow at 4:30 AM and take highly inappropriate flights to unwanted cities with hopes of connecting to other overbooked flights that might get us home. What airline gave me this chorizo grande? I won't name them, first because even this hassle is better than flying with a broken hydraulic line, ans second because I don't want US Airways' lawyers sending me letters.