I went back to New England, but had to be back in Texas for 7 PM today. My options were early morning flight and short layover, or late morning flight and long layover. Well, of course I opted for the early morning flight, figuring I would take a nap when I got home.
Alas I missed my flight (well the doors closing) by literally fifteen seconds, meaning I wait three hours after getting up at 3 AM, and get the long layover to boot. The frustrating thing is that I left with a view to getting to the airport an hour and fifteen minutes before my flight, it took a perfect storm of everything going wrong for me to miss my flight.
First, my father needs to stop for gas, but the pumps at the gas station on the way are down. My father goes out of the way to a gas station five minutes off the route, and waits five minutes at a traffic light before realizing it's broken and making a double right to get around it. Then, at four-thirty in the morning, there is a patch of standstill traffic on the highway, which adds another ten minutes.
I then get into the airport, and find that the line is three times longer than I'm used to. Apparently this is normal for Hartford now, but it's a new normal I wasn't prepared for. When I finally get to the baggage scanner, two of the three people immediately in front of me have not taken out electronics or liquids, so the TSA gets bins and the customers in front of me open their luggage and search for the stuff. The second guy is especially slow, and I hear my name called while he's searching for the liquids he knew to bag but not to put in an accessible place.
The TSA always pats me down after the scanners, so I'm in the habit of opting out of the scanners entirely, but that cost up to five minutes, so I submit to the scanning and additional patdown. Then, my luggage is selected for a manual inspection, which lately also seems to happen every time. While the world's slowest TSA agent, paws through my stuff, I hear my name called with what sounded like a ten minute warning and breathe a sigh of relief, but it must have been a two minute warning. TSA clown cannot figure out how my luggage all fits together again, and is shoving stuff desultorily like a spoiled teenager asked to wash the dishes, so I offer to shove a bunch of stuff into my laptop bag and carry my sweatshirt.
I then sprint until I'm out of breath, then powerwalk. One gate down, they announce a thirty second warning, so I sprint again, waving at the gatekeeper. I get there, and she tells me it's closed. Which makes me wonder: if you can't make the gate sprinting from one gate down, what is even the point of the thirty second warning?
Any rate, should get back to Texas, if all goes well from here, just in time to shower and change and go to the thing I really need to be at.