Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

My ride home was on schedule and uneventful.  The recent DC9/MD80 crash in Madrid was a reminder that these things still occur, and was part of my awareness as I boarded a DC9 for my Milwaukee-Minneapolis flight.  As we rolled for takeoff, it seemed they were “babying” it into the air instead of the brash “rotate up and leap into the air” that I always anticipate and even now sort of thrill to.  I fancied FAA airworthiness directives, dialogue in the pilots’ lounge, lots drawn, losers getting the DC9 assignments.  Probably my imagination.

On the MSP-SEA leg, I was #3 on the upgrade standby list, but there’s no bronze medal in that event.  All of them showed up, and I trudged back to my seat in coach.  Not a bad seat, exit-row aisle, but still.

The woman seated next to me - petite, thankfully, eschewing the arm-rest - noted to her daughter that we were taking off at 9:30 and arriving in Seattle at 11:00, “an hour-and-a-half flight”.  In her 50s, reading a Ken Follett book that, OK, it’s thriller-stuff, but there are a lot of words and pages and you might presume that a person with an interest in such world-ranging, technology-intensive material would be at least dimly aware of the existence of time zones.

It’s one thing for your airplane seatmate to be geographically stunted, it’s another for your airport shuttle-driver to lack basic knowledge of your city’s layout.  There were 5 of us in the shuttle making four stops.  We had chatted amongst ourselves and with the driver about our addresses, etc, before we left and were having a lively conversation about our various neighborhoods.  We were arrayed in a fairly straight line northbound from SeaTac, and we passengers had settled the sequence of our drop-offs.

Then the driver consults his onboard computer and named the first stop.  It happened to be a guy who lived somewhere in the middle of that northbound line, and would have required passing right by two others of us who were further south.  One of us, turned out, worked for the Postal Service (and was returning from a work-related gathering in Las Vegas?  Just for that event, I can imagine, chips came in multiples of 42 cents, with the option to buy 1- and 2-cent chips if the house announced an increase), and I’m completely certain that he could hear your address and accurately spit back at you your zip+4.

With him as our bulwark, we performed an intellectual hijack of the shuttle from the computer and the driver, and verbally instructed the reluctant driver on required lane changes, exits, etc.  Through a combination of steely insistence cloaked in a tone of cheery helpfulness, we got at least as far as Chez Perils, where I grabbed my bags and wished them well.