Up in the Air Part II

Coming back from a trip is a funny thing. The minute you walk in the door, and after the 3 or 4 subsequent days that you don't unpack, it feels like you never left. All that said, the gettin there and the gettin back can make for some fun times.

This post is a sequal to Up in The Air, which was posted after my last trip.

The flight out was pretty uneventful. Though while waiting in the terminal, I observed that people really seem to enjoy standing in lines, clusters, or bunches. Otherwise, why would they stand up there if there zone has not yet been called. In the case of the flight I was on, the people waiting for the plane quite literally created a wall around the door that made it very difficult for anyone in zone 2 and 3 to break through.

Boarding in Zones is kind of an interesting concept as well. One thing I've never really understood is why the plane gets boarded from the front to the back. Now I understand that those first class folks (and from what I can tell most of them are first class all the way -eyeroll) want to sit and sip their club sodas in their big comfy chairs, but don't they realize that all of us coachers are looking at them and just resenting them the whole time we walk by their 6-8 rows of in-flight bliss.

As my plane was getting ready to land, the fasten seatbelt sign flashed to signal to everyone "hey the plane is landing in like 5 minutes," which prompted one guy to literally get up, and sprint through first class to the bathroom. I thought, "we're going to land the plane with this guy in the bathroom...I hope he likes a dash of blue water on his clothes."

The trip back was a real life lesson in inefficiency. At the SLC airport, they have what is called a family line. The family line  is a seperate line set aside for two reasons: 1) to allow families traveling with small children to get through security without incident and 2) to prevent other passengers from being held up by families and their 75 things they're taking with them. In SLC, the line also serves as the means by which airport personnel get to the terminal. I cannot begin to express to you how dumb I think this is.

So, we get there and there are two "families" standing in front of us. One of them is a mother and daughter combo. The daughter is at minimum 14...small children? I had no issue with the other family, but during the time we were waiting to get to the security scanner, quite literally 20 airport employees walked through ahead of us. Then, a nice 18 year old kid who worked for the airline wheeled an older lady up to the front of the line. That's cool, I'm a fan of the elderly...but then we hear from the back "wait! wait! wait!" and up comes 4-5 people who are apparently traveling with said elderly women. None of them have problems mind you, and none of them cared enough to push her, but they were all apparently important enough to go to the front of the line.

Once we got through the first part of security, the cutting really began. Several airport employees were very litterally shoving my stuff backwards on the conveyor belt to make room for their stuff. After about 15 people did this, I got a hair irritated. I started forcing the issue with my stuff and stopped short of the ole talking loudly trick (you know, the one where you say something to someone else with you so that the offender can hear you loud and clear).

We finally made it through, and ended up sitting in front of someone who thought he was Larry the Cable Guy...he was just full of one-liners and whoppers...and really made me glad to be sitting in front of him. All in all it was another great opportunity for people watching...