my life in airports

Last night, I paid $24 for an inedible pizza through room service… this morning, $30 for a big breakfast that I asked to be delivered at 7am (they arrived at 6:45am). I woke up early to give myself plenty of time to get showered, packed, and to the airport, and as it turns out, I needed every second of it. My directions sent me to some lonely National car rental lot with wrecked cars far from the airport. On arriving, my carry on bag was searched and determined to be a threat to airline security because I had a non-solid substance in excess of 3 ounces that wasn’t hermetically sealed inside a 1 quart zip lock sandwich bag. Those sandwich bag makers must be very happy. I’m not. It just goes to show what a ruse these rules are… I carried on the exact same bag on my flight from Chicago and Greensboro. That’s two out of three times that they missed the deadly gel.

I remember right before September 11, I flew from Austin to Los Angeles to work on some puppet animation with a couple of friends. In my bag, I had two ten pound blocks of modeling clay, floral wire, many metal clay sculpting tools, a box of one hundred razors, and various other things that in this climate would look like I was going to spend my time on the plane actually creating a bomb. The poor guy at security who saw all this said into his radio something to the effect of: “I’ve got a Red 476, Red 476!” About 8 security guys came running with hands on their guns. Once I explained what I was doing, they lightened up and just told me to check the bag. If that happened now, I would probably be stripped searched and put on the no-fly list. My how things have changed.

Yesterday I was leaving Greensboro, and logged onto what was apparently a paid wireless network with what was apparently my department head’s T-mobile account (I’m using a borrowed computer from the school). Oops! The Louisville airport doesn’t have free wireless either, which makes the airport in Charlotte all the more appealing with its free wifi. The short of it is I’ll be posting this at some later point when I don’t have pay $9 to do it.