I've flown cross-country on the day before Thanksgiving every year for the past fifteen years. Yes, the vaunted "Most Heavily Traveled Day of the Entire Year". The day that brings dire warnings of lengthy security checkpoints and clogged roads.
"You're flying out on WEDNESDAY?!?!" my co-worker asks me absolutely astonished by my unbridled chutzpah, "Oh, you better get there like... four, maybe five hours early. It's going to be a crazy house at the airport!!! Haven't you been listening to the news?!?!? How are you getting there?"
"I'm going to park off-site and take a shuttle over."
"Whaaaa???? Are you CRAZY? They'll be out of spaces by 6am!!! Don't you watch the news?!?!"
Yes, I must be crazy. Crazy for falling for this fear-induced lunacy every freaking year.
Let's get something straight. I fly out of LAX. One of the world's busiest airports. And while on any other given day the employees of LAX are a bureaucratic, incompetent mass of fuckery, for some reason they pull their shit together on the day before Thanksgiving.
It's unreal.
It's like they take their A-Team of talented security screeners, airport police, air-traffic controllers and gate attendents and schedule them all on that Wednesday.
I breezed through the off-site parking lot. On any other day there would be a 10-15 minute wait for a shuttle and then 10 minutes to get to the terminal. On the day before Thanksgiving, there were tons of shuttles ready to leave and then 2 minutes to the terminal. Why? Because the airport police was out in the full force directing traffic and ticketing idling cars/buses at the passenger unloading area.
So now I'm out of the long-term parking at record speed and now standing in the terminal. Where's the large security line? Where are the massive protests over the full-body scanners? There are none (unless you want to count the student activist handing out leaflets at the entrance).
You might assume that the day before Thanksgiving brings out all the rubes who have never flown in a plane, and families with diaper bags, breast milk and strollers -- the sort of folks who might choke the security lines. And you'd be right. Except that because there is so much fear over the long security lines these amateur flyers actually take some effort to research the rules in advance. They usually know the carry-on rules, and the 4-ounces of liquid in a Ziplock baggie requirement, and are generally cooperative with TSA instructions.
And if they don't, the TSA has prepared their staff accordingly to deal with these hordes professionally and promptly.
So now I'm at the security checkpoint where I have my choice of four agents ready to check my ID against my boarding pass. 30 seconds later I'm approaching the x-ray machines. TSA has all checkpoints open and none of them is more than 3 passengers deep. I make my way to the last checkpoint where there is no wait.
Despite my Semitic features -- dark hair, bushy eyebrows, and youthful appearance -- there is no pat down. No body scan.
3 minutes later I am through security. 3 minutes after that, I am at my gate. 3 hours early. 3 hours early because I listened to the fucking local news. FOOLED AGAIN. 15 years of flying home for Thanksgiving and you'd think I would've learned that it's the easiest day to fly.
But wait, I didn't listen to the local news. I listened to my co-worker who listened to the local news.
And the local news seems to exists solely to pander fear and shill their parent company's content and products.
Take my own mother who religiously watches the local news. I'm not sure if she'll ever eat bagged spinach, ride an escalator, or arrive less than three hours to the airport again. But at least she knows that there will be a new episode of Law and Order: SVU that evening. The day I fear the most is the day I make her a grandmother, because then I'm going to be overwhelmed with her endless worrying about faulty car seats, poisonous tap water, flammable blankets, and whatever else the local news thinks is going to kill my baby.
Sorry for the rant. I had three hours of downtime at my gate to think all this up.
Oh, and my flight landed on time. And it took less then seven minutes for the luggage to appear at baggage claim. And they didn't lose my luggage. And there was no line to pay at the short-term garage where my mother picked me up. And no traffic on the way home.
There was, however, a woman on my flight who had a nervous breakdown before we took off, and we had to taxi back to the gate to drop her off. Probably because she watches the local news.
0 comments:
Post a Comment