Or…Airport Nightmares
*Names have been changed to protect the mildly insane.
Traveling can be a nightmare. Whether you’re flying for pleasure, business, or personal reasons, it seems like you can’t spend any time in an airport these days without at least one minor thing going wrong. Or maybe ten minor things. Or eighteen major things. The more you travel, the greater the likelihood that you will encounter airport aggravation. No one knows this better than my friend, Claudia. (Apologies to any real Claudia Zenks out there. I promise, this is not you. I told my Claudia that I would use a fake name for her story, and Claudia Zenk was the first that popped to mind. It has a nice ring to it, no?) (And when I say, “my friend,” I really do mean “my friend.” ie. NOT me). Phew, I think I’m covered.
A year or two ago, my friend Claudia needed to travel to her hometown several times over the course of many months to help her family through a difficult time. Things grew so harrowing for awhile there that she flew to her hometown four or five times in one month! This was only a one-hour flight. One would think, considering everything Claudia had to handle between helping her family and maintaining her job and raising two young children, that the airport gods could have given her a break. Not so. Every time Claudia went to the airport during that month, another disaster befell her. Sometimes it was a minor disaster, sometimes plain ol’ SNAFU and FUBAR up the mother-effin’ whazoo. Now, Claudia is a wonderful person. Claudia is kind to rodents, dust bunnies, and chocolate bars. There’s no reason why the airport gods should dislike her so. There’s no reason (well, maybe a tiny bit of a reason) why, during one of these airport atrocities, Claudia should have discovered that the airline clerk had typed “belligerent” into her customer profile. But let’s just say that Claudia did discover this. And let’s just say that CLAUDIA HAD HAD ENOUGH.
Claudia did not need another airport disaster. Surely, on the fourth or fifth trip home to help her family, Claudia WOULD NOT say or do anything to tick off the airline personnel, thereby reducing her chances of having her “belligerent” status withdrawn. Surely, Claudia could make one visit to her hometown where everything at the airport would proceed smoothly.
Claudia did not take Herself into account.
Yes, sometimes Claudia’s airport nightmares are self-induced.
Now, Claudia is a superb athlete. Claudia is one of those warped breed of women who not only run for exercise but because they :::shudder::: like it. Because running helps them tap into a part of the brain that allows them to forget their worries and just exist. To be one with the wind and the sun and the sky and the path beneath their feet and all that crap. So, a few hours before Claudia needed to travel to the airport on the tail end of her last trip to her hometown during that flight-jammed month, she decided the best possible thing she could do for her mental well-being was go for a run.
Claudia donned her running gear and hauled herself to a massive provincial park near where I live that has a myriad of running paths as well as an utterly amazing view of a glittering lake:
It also has rattlesnakes and cougars and coyotes and cactus, so some might question Claudia’s decision to run in the park alone. But that’s a topic for another day.
The end result was, Claudia was at the park. So Claudia did what Claudia does. She ran. She ran and ran and ran. Her stress and worries melted away. Because she’s basically The Bionic Woman reborn, Claudia ran until all the rattlesnakes and cougars and coyotes and cacti chasing her collapsed and died on the sides of the path.
When Claudia runs, if she notices pretty stones on or near her path, she likes to pick them up for her two young children. On this day, Claudia discovered stones her children would love! Alas, alack, amiss, Claudia realized upon gathering the stones that she did not have a pocket to put them in. So Claudia did what any (mildly insane) mother would do. She stuffed the stones in her bra. Then continued running. She ran and ran and ran. She ran until her stress was almost/nearly alleviated. Or maybe it was completely annihilated. I honestly can’t recall.
Claudia finished her run and returned to her childhood home. There, it dawned on her that she did not have time before her flight for a shower. So she sponged herself clean, then changed into her traveling clothes and proceeded to the airport.
Now, it’s a small airport. One would think that the security lines would be short. One would be wrong. Sometimes the security lines are miles and miles (okay, kilometers, this is Canada, after all) long. Whether the lines were long on this particular day or not, I don’t recall. I just had to point that out. Couldn’t let the whole focus of my post be on Claudia, could I?
As Claudia proceeded through the line, she thought surely nothing would go wrong this time. The security personnel would not confiscate her homemade jam (calling it over-sized liquid, the nerve!) They would not attempt to rip the soles off her sandals to determine if the beeping of the security arch was due to whatever type of metal thingie is put into good shoes. They would not wand her in indiscreet places before realizing that another instance of beeping was a result of tiny metal eyelets on her boarding shorts. They would not put her through any of that trauma (or the traumas that had resulted in her “belligerent” status, which are too lengthy to go into). And, in fact, they did not. Not this time.
Claudia managed it all on her own.
Claudia walked through the security arch. No beeping. Yippee! Then the Airport Security Lady (let’s call her Sally) told her, “You’ve been randomly selected for a body search.” Yes, just the sort of thing a haggard traveler loves to hear. The gentleman behind Claudia in line laughed.
Claudia was not amused. Did I mention that Claudia HAD HAD ENOUGH? However, she did not rail or vent her frustrations out on Sally. She just didn’t care anymore. She just wanted to let Sally do whatever she had to do so Claudia could board the plane and fly home to her husband and two small children.
Claudia was resigned.
So when Sally asked Claudia if she wanted to go into a private room for the search, Claudia declined. “Just do it here,” she said. “Get it over with.” After all, Claudia had nothing to hide.
Sally began to pat Claudia down. When Sally reached Claudia’s…bosom area…well, I don’t know how much or what sort of patting occurred. The regular sort of patting, I guess. It’s not like Sally grabbed Claudia’s hooters or anything. But Sally discovered…something odd in the sides of Claudia’s bra. Something Claudia had totally forgotten she’d put there.
Bless Claudia’s little ol’ Canuck heart, when Sally asked, “What are you carrying in your bra?”, Claudia suddenly remembered and answered with a completely straight face, “Rocks.”
“Remove them, please,” said Sally with an equally straight face. (One can only imagine what Sally reported to her friends and family later).
Claudia reached into her bra and removed the rocks. She handed the rocks to Sally, who set them on the conveyor on the “out” side of the X-Ray machine.
Sally continued to pat Claudia down. Alas, alack, amiss, Sally did not discover anything else unusual. Finished, Sally asked Claudia, “Would you like your rocks back?”
Now, blog readers, I ask…what would you do?
Claudia answered in a perfectly solemn tone, “Yes.”
Sally handed Claudia back her rocks—and our dear Claudia stuffed them into her bra! Not in her jacket pockets. Not in her purse. In her bra. And she took them home to her grateful children. Who I’m pretty sure, to this day, have no clue of the extent of their mother’s insanity love for them.
I don’t know about you, but that’s the best Airport Nightmares story I’ve ever heard. I definitely can’t top Claudia’s tale. Can you? What’s your most embarrassing airport moment?
I roller skated. Backwards, no less!
I traveled in our motorcoach.
I played in the sand.
I visited Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
We grilled hot dogs, roasted marshmallows and I saw the Milky Way for the very first time. Mostly, I was a kid again.