| “I just want a GODDAMN COKE!!!” I’d reached my limit. My entire happiness and the redemption of my first day of vacation hinged upon the timely delivery of a caffeinated beverage. Complete happiness? That’s a lot to ask of a simple beverage. How had I come to this?
In a word: travel. For better or for worse, traveling magnifies your personal idiosyncrasies. Safely diluted in the quagmire of everyday junk under normal circumstances, they painfully crystallize when you are encapsulated in a small space, occasionally revealing a monster you didn’t know you had inside of you. Of course, I had my reasons for being unreasonable on that particular occasion.
The past three hours had been trying, to say the least. Having run through the gamut from customer complaints to coworkers’ woes, I left work 15 minutes later than I’d planned, but still having gotten nothing done the whole morning. Traffic was backed up on the highway for no apparent reason, adding another 15 minutes. Unable to check in at the airline’s self-service kiosk, because now we were within 30 minutes of takeoff, we waited in line for a ticket agent to finish shouting at an obviously not deaf, but obviously foreign gentleman, who couldn’t understand that he had to pay an extra $80 because his bag was over the weight limit. This caused us to miss our first flight.
Miraculously, the ticket agent got us rescheduled on a later flight, and we proceeded to the Security Checkpoint. Clueless college students, confused grandmas, and frazzled moms with rambunctious children made their way clumsily through the metal detectors ahead of us, each one having to be reminded to carry their boarding pass through the gate. Ever the lucky traveler, I was (of course) picked for a random search amid the chaos. I was running on four hours of sleep. The gate agent haughtily argued with me that my teeny purse put me over the 2-carry-on-bag limit, and that I would either have to fit it into my overstuffed computer bag or check it. The sum of these trials added up to my explosion once we sat down in our cramped seats near a crying baby, and my boyfriend asked me what was wrong: “I just want a GODDAMN COKE!!!”
I don’t even drink Coke that often; I usually prefer water, or tea. But just then it was Coke or nothing. I waited anxiously for the flight attendant with her little pushcart. She finally came. And they didn’t have any Coke. Would I like Pepsi instead?
Somehow the flight attendant, my boyfriend, the other passenger sitting next to me, and I all survived the incident with only minor injuries, and I wasn’t sued by the airline.
I’m not the only one that sometimes exhibits Dr. Jekyl / Mr. Hyde-like behavior while traveling, I’ve observed. Consider the sweet-looking little old lady who suddenly transforms into Hulk Hogan when trying to force her oversized, over packed bag into the overstuffed overhead compartment. Or the enormous linebacker-type guy who suddenly begins to fidget and squirm like a two-year-old once the plane starts moving, craning his thick non-neck to look out of the window. And don’t even think about getting in the way of the ill prepared, ill-tempered businessman who is going to be late for his appointment because his flight’s delayed. He doesn’t even see you, man: you’re not even a pixel in his palm pilot. He’ll plow you right over as you stand gawking at the monitors, searching for your departure gate. These people are probably perfectly normal on a day-to-day basis, buying their groceries, driving to work, eating dinner with their families. But put them in a travel situation, and pow! Zap! Psychosis redefined! They become unrecognizable to themselves and to others.
Which tells us something about departures. And travel. And human nature in general: if the longest journey begins with the first step, then it’s a short jump off the cliffs of insanity. Or was it: to the rolling stone that gathers no moss, there’s a thin line between love and late. Or: Hell hath no fury as a woman parched. I dunno. Maybe I’ll be able to think more clearly when I get a Coke.
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