The Airplane Curse Continues: Why Our Country Is In a Depression and Other Assorted Rants & Realizations

And the curse continues.

I'm sitting here at LaGuardia, paying for Internet, because my flight is delayed indefinitely.  11:55am flight and it's a beautiful freaking day outside.  Today was supposed to be my non-stressful day where I didn't have to work at all for once until Monday morning and could finally have a non-work-filled weekend with Jay.  And it really did start in a relaxing manner.  Got up, watched "Grey's Anatomy" online (it was actually quite fabulous), had plenty of time to get ready and leave with 2 hours to spare.

Then I hit standstill traffic on the Cross Island Parkway and was delayed for over 30 minutes.  It finally cleared up and I went to the bagel store in Astoria that Jay loves and got a ton of bagels.  There was a long line, which I expected, so no surprises there.  I get to the airport finally and the parking lot is closed, of course.  I manage to get a pretty good spot in a different lot and run inside to security.  It's like 11:10am at this point.

Here's an actual somewhat humorous part:  The family traveling ahead of me on the security line managed to EACH set off the security metal detector AND all have to have their bags checked for having liquids that were too big, etc.  No, they were not black or Arab.  They were just plain ignorant dumbasses.  The girl was arguing over contact solution.  I felt like screaming at her, "Let it go!  Buy the travel size for a fucking dollar when you get to where you're going, bitch."

But moving on to the funny: The guy looks at me strangely after he checks out my bag.  I know exactly what's up and I go, "If you're wondering who would bring bagels on a plane, it's me."

He goes, "Yeah, I was actually.  Why?"  I explain that I'm bringing NY bagels to Raleigh, where they don't have good bagels and I promised to bring them down.  He started laughing a lot and let me go through.

So I get through security and into the terminal and I find that my gate has changed, but no one had told me this originally.  So I trek all the way back from Gate 7 to Gate 1 with my heavy bagel-filled bags.  It's 11:30am.  I see that we're not boarding yet and McDonalds is right near the gate, so I go get a fountain Diet Coke (who can resist fountain beverages, seriously) and get back to see boarding has begun.  I get in line and I see people coming back off the plane.  I inquire why and some gal tells me that it's because they said something was wrong.  The woman at the gate tells us that they've been informed by the crew that there's a "maintenance problem" and they have to wait for maintenance to come and look at it and then fix it.

The woman sitting next to me is an older version of me.  She immediately started bitching about how she's been here for 2 hours and is positive that the plane has been sitting here for at least that long, so why on Earth would they only decide to check it NOW, 20 minutes before take-off?  She's got a fabulous point.  And I'd bet my next plane ticket that they didn't check the plane earlier because they didn't want to do work before they absolutely had to.  Not to get controversial, but that's the fucking problem with this country today.  No one wants to do work, to work hard.  No wonder the economy is how it is.  There's a bunch of lazy assholes in this country.  I work 7 days a week and I have nothing to show for it, yet someone who doesn't work at all and has no drive or desire to can just open their hands.  After 9/11, people wanted things and they got it, regardless of whether or not they could pay for it and now we're all paying the price.  I'm talking about everyone, lest anybody think that I'm picking on the lower income people.  You invest your money in the stock market, it's still paper money.  You get caught spending money you don't have in the first place on second homes and what not and then whine about how life's not fair.  I see people who come into my job with worker's compensation injuries and some continually make excuses to not be able to go back to work.  God forbid you got into an elevator with crutches or had to limp from your desk to the bathroom.  God forbid you have to go back to working for a living.

You're either lazy or you're greedy.  Greed is the head of a Wall Street corporation who still takes his $500,000 bonus for the year regardless of all the jobs that have been lost because of how shitty you ran your company.  Greed is constantly taking, taking, taking and not putting back into society.  And I'd say that 90% of the people I know and am associated with are NOT like that.  So it's not all hopeless, but there's a large faction of people in this country that are like that and it's not fair to the rest of us who are losing money, jobs, etc.  And as I've bitched about before, we all treat each other like complete shit.  Even the ticket agents here are being nasty over the loudspeaker and I have not heard one person - myself included - who has confronted them in a nasty way (or at all) yet.

So at least this delay hasn't yet brought on a fit of crying and swearing yet  I've just decided to take it out on my fellow Americans.  The update since I began writing this post about 45 minutes ago is that they're going to try to change planes.  We have to wait for them to get another plane, then bring it to the gate, then have the crew change planes themselves, then prepare the cabin, then maybe get it checked out by maintenance to see if it's good to go, then we'll get our boarding time.  Joy.  I love spending my supposed-non-stressful-Saturdays waiting in airports for a problem that could have been detected hours ago to be solved now at the expense of everyone else.

Maybe I'll go update "The Plane Truth" while I wait.  Or go network and try to find someone who lives/works in Raleigh now to find me a job there so I can move and not have to ever wait around in airports twice a month again.