Thursday, August 19, 2010

Long Division

Yesterday I spent ten minutes standing just inside the open doorway of an MD90 at O'Hare waiting on the 300lb structural marvel ahead of me to shoehorn her lumpy butt into a seat entirely too small for it.

Due to the immense quantity of lumbering flesh in my path, I found myself parked against my will right outside the bathroom. It soon became abundantly clear that someone was inside the airplane bathroom doing their best to destroy the atmosphere. We are not airborne. We are parked at the gate. The A/C is not running.

I don't understand why anyone would sit in an airport right outside a large, land-based bathroom for 2 hours and "hold it" until you get on the plane. I can certainly see "holding it" until you get off the plane, but the other way around just doesn't make sense. Perhaps one might do that if one had some kind of weird fetish, but I truly don't know what kind of fetish category that falls under. It certainly doesn't sound like the kind of wicked fun most fetishists seem to crave, but it must have seemed reasonable to the idiot in 2A.

I genuinely hope life punishes him for it long-term.

I'm standing there in the apex of a swirling smell storm with a 1" thick accordion-style folding door between me and an overpowering odor that I can only describe as "hot", and I'm landlocked by the morbidly obese. The whole front of the plane smelled like somebody snuck a dead zebra on in their luggage.

This is my day.

Naturally, I'm desperately casting about for something to take my mind off the aluminum-skinned box of hell Delta has put me in, so I look over my left shoulder into the cockpit and I see the captain sitting at the controls. He has a pad of paper clipped to the yoke in front of him and and he's staring at it hard, brow furrowed in intense concentration, pencil in hand. Upon that piece of paper he, the captain of an airplane full of unsuspecting people, has written this:



And you know what? That's fine. I'm sure there are millions of people out there who struggle with math, but it really, really, really worries me to find that a person in charge of something with this many parts:



can't perform long division.

2 comments:

Maggie said...

This reminds me of one of the last times I flew somewhere. Daniel and I were going to see Beau when he was in TX getting chemo. Our plane was supposed to leave at 8:00 PM but it kept getting delayed by lightning storms and a "problem" with the plane that had to be fixed. During one unusually bright flash of lightning, I glanced outside to see SCAFFOLDING around our plane...SCAFFOLDING! Before I could poke Daniel and say "OMG, they're taking our plane apart", a Mexican guy jogs through the door to the plane with a sketch on a NAPKIN. I'm not kidding. We took off at 11:30 and somehow made it to TX. This, too, was a Delta flight...hmmmmmm.

K@ said...

I like the fact that you either swipped the drawing from the cockpit or that you took the time to memorize the Capt.'s paper.