Sunday, December 18, 2005

My little brother used my quilt while I was away. I hope they washed it.

Over the past four months or so that comprised my first semester of college, I began to flatter myself that I was becoming quite a capable young lady. So I was not at all worried about flying home by myself. Why should I be? Piece of cake. It's not exactly complicated, you know, especially when your boarding pass is emailed to you and all you have to do is check your bags and traipse merrily to your waiting flight. Not hard at all. Why, a child could do it.
This is all true. However. I do not live at the airport. I live half an hour away from the airport. So to accomplish the easy task of checking in and whatnot, I have to GET to the airport.
And all of you wonderfully bright people cry in unison, "Simple! Take a shuttle!" Ah, yes, dear ones, simple indeed. ORU ever so graciously provided it's wheel-less students with vans to cart them to and from the airport. So all that remains for the student is to be at the shuttle place on time.
Ay, there's the rub...I, capable young lady of eighteen summers, am apparently unable to wake to an abnormally strident and shrill alarm clock. So I do not catch the four o'clock shuttle for my 5.30 flight-- I catch the 4.45. I get to the airport at ten after, and that only because the shuttle driver was none other than my own dear former TA, Anna Scott, who drove like one possessed. And who refused to leave until she was sure they had let me on the plane. Which they didn't. Because by the time the nice but extremely lackadaisical people in front of me had reached the front of the line, it was 5.23. So I was switched to a 10.30 this morning.
Ten thirty? No problem.
I woke up at twenty after eight. I had planned to wake up at quarter after seven.
Again, no big deal. I got downstairs by eight thirty to catch the 8.45. I had sat in the freezing cold for several minutes when a cold, slimy, all-too-familiar fear began to wrap its oily tentacles around my heart. I turned around-- slowly-- and read the poster above me. Four times.
There would be no 8.45 shuttle. There would be no 9.00 shuttle. The next shuttle wasn't due til four. In the afternoon.
Chaos ensued. I tore up to Towers and called Josh Young, because he was the only person left on campus that I knew who had a car. I woke him up. He agreed to take me if i could give him directions. So Rachel went to her computer.
Enter Murphy's Law: when you are in a hurry to get something off of your computer, your computer will inevitably crash. What we got was a few hurried notations that didn't make any sense. So we got lost.
Somewhere on the Creek turnpike there is a stout elderly tollbooth gentleman who deserves life's choicest blessings. He gave wonderful directions. The problem: we were twenty miles out of the way and it was past 9.30. But Josh got that look on his face: the half sneer that all drivers get when faced with such a challenge-- "twenty miles? That's cake."
We were going 90 for most of the way...I think we pushed 100 at one point. You could barely feel it. What a car.
Made it to the airport at 10.00. Now I am home. My flights were uneventful-- thankfully on my connection from Chicago there was a seat between myself and the large lumpy shiny-pated man beside me, else I would have suffered a fate like unto Kimi's.

In retrospect it was all very funny. But I am really ashamed of myself for this morning. I put a lot of people to a lot of unneccessary trouble. I felt like a little kid. In a not nice way. So now I am home. There is snow everywhere. But I will save that for later...
...that's right...keep you coming back for more....

2 comments:

kimi said...

hehe...awesome! dont feel bad. everyone is bound to miss a flight sometime. yours was for a very understandable reason, considering you probably didn't go to bed until dawn was breaking.
hehe.
ah. hooray for shiny-pated men. i'll probably be one someday. or i'll marry one.

Megan said...

I love that you measured your age in summers and that you referenced Murphy's Law, one of the major pillars of my existence.