Outward Bound
Reagan National
I have had all night to aggravate about not being upgraded by Delta. On my way to the airport I decided to rationalize: I have to fly to Paris in coach so that I can pretty much fly in first class everywhere next year.
It is, I have decided, the travel equivalent of liposuction: You have to have someone slice a hole in your belly big enough to stick an Oreck vacuum cleaner under your skin and pick up the extra fat cells, small boulders, various types of fruits in the melon family, and anything else you've eaten over the past 15 years.
After that, you swell up like George Forman after a cooking demonstration for a couple of weeks and then you get skinny.
Flying coach for 37 hours is the same thing. Except for the vacuum cleaner part.
At any rate, I got to the airport at about 10:45 am for a 1:45 pm flight. Why? Because I misread the clock in the kitchen when I called for the taxicab.
No problem. I waited patiently in the First Class & Medallion Level line and got my boarding passes for row 22 on the Washington, DC to Cincinnati leg. And row 2,347 on the Cincinnati to Charles de Gaulle leg.
I am now blaming this on Charles de Gaulle who, I think, was one of the founders of Delta Airlines.
The three letter code for Cincinnati is CVG. The three letter code for Charles de Gaulle is CDG. This would make a pretty good ad for whichever cell phone company is running that series which has the family thinking they were going to Steamboat Springs for skiing and, instead, ends up in Palm Springs.
Hello? Leo? I've got a great idea for an ad. Here it is:Voice Over: We thought we were going to visit grandma in Cincinnati, but static on my cell phone ...
Little Boy being frisked by a guy in a uniform which makes him look like Claude Raines in "Casablanca": Dad? Why are these people so nasty?
Boy's father, over his shoulder from the lean-and-spread position against a cinder block wall: I don't know, Jimmy. I guess it's because the Bengals have been so bad for so long.
Voice Over: Don't let cell phone static send you to France.
At the security station the people who don't speak English very well were training other people who didn't speak their language very well which meant that every piece of luggage went through the X-ray machine 73 times. They should have put the Senate's mail on the thing at the same time to irradiate it into harmlessness.
I saw my friend Melanie who used to work in the Crown Room but now works the Delta shuttle desk and we had a nice chat while the enhanced security operation poked through my stuff.
"I ken luke in thees?" said a woman holding up my non-European hold-all-very-manly-Eddie-Bauer-shoulder-bag.
"Sure."
Of course, when she took everything out there was no way she got it back in the same way so, like a four-year-old with a favorite jig saw puzzle, I spent the first 20 minutes of my Crown Room stay putting it all back together just the way I like it.
I got checked in. I bored Debbie, who was running the desk, to tears with my needing 16,000-miles-for-Platinum story and, as an aside, asked her how full Business Class was on the CVG-CDG leg.
She began telling me I couldn't upgrade on my fare, but I told her I knew that.
"It's pretty full," she said. "There are six empty seats."
"Six," I said. "Hmm."
While the computer was booting, I went to get a cup of coffee but there was no hot chocolate for my famous Café Mocha mixture.
"Is there any hot chocolate in the back?" I asked nicely.
"No," responded the woman behind the bar.
"Why not?" I asked. Nicely. Sort of.
"I don't know."
I wanted to ask if she would know if I were flying in Business Elite instead of sitting in seat Q in row three million. But I didn't.
Liposuction.
A man came in a few minutes later carrying his own cup of coffee and his own computer. The computer was quiet. The coffee was quiet. But the man was a coffee-zooper. You know the sound? They zoop the coffee then sigh loudly with the ecstasy of it all.
The problem with coffee zoopers is the do it for every sip of the entire cup. They are serial zoopers. And, it is a sound which, once it has gotten into your consciousness, cannot be ignored. Not only can it not be ignored, it bores into your brain - not though your ears, but through your eyeballs.
This phenomenon is much more pronounced, I discovered, when you are staring down the barrel of a 165 hour trip. I finally turned to the guy and asked him, politely, if he wouldn't mind drinking his coffee more quietly or, if preferred, he wouldn't mind having it spilled over his head.
I didn't actually say that last part but I thought it pretty darned loudly, boy.
Continued.