This is one of those not-so rare Christine-get-your-head-outta-your-ass moments. Enjoy at my expense.

So I'm at the Buffalo airport, waiting for my flight...I get there about an hour and 15 minutes early, so I decide to power up the laptop and work on some Marquette pics, and chat it up with a friend. So there I am, clicking around in Photoshop and yap yap yapping away like a chihuahua on speed. Then all of the sudden, I hear something on the airport intercom. It sounds like my name. I say on the phone, "hold on..." and I listen...

"Last call for passenger Christine Estacio for flight 152 to Pittsburgh. Christine Estacio, please come to gate 28."

Oh shit. I'm AT gate 28 and I had entered some sort of time warp where I had been talking on the phone for 1 hour and 5 minutes. The whole fucking plane had boarded already. I snapped my phone shut, yanked the laptop cord out of the socket, grab may jacket, purse and laptop case, snap shut my laptop and gather the cord around me and look up at the gate. It's empty, except for the airline workers, who look at me, and know that I am the Christine Estacio they have desperately been searching for. I run to the gate, which isn't very fast because my power cord is still dragging behind me and I haven't even bothered to put my laptop back in its case.

I run up to the woman taking the tickets and say, 'I'm so sorry!' and she looks at me with scolding eyes and says, 'Honey, they're all waiting for you!'

I hang my head down in shame as I run out of the gate.

And just my luck, I have to board outside. The guy at the door says, 'The plane is on the left.' I nod and run out, and, hey, there's 2 planes on my left, buddy! I'm so frazzled, I pick one. I run up the stairs into the plane, and realize that I threw my ticket in my bag somewhere and I have no idea what my seat is. So I just pick one. And I sit down, still with all my shit in my arms. I finally get my stuff packed away and under the chair in front of me when a thought comes to me. What if I'm on the wrong plane? There were TWO planes on the left, and it's not like when I got on the plane they told me where I was going. So I'm sitting there in a panic.

The flight attendants make an announcement about the flight, but at that very moment, the lady sitting next to me decides to start conversation, so I don't get to hear the end of the sentence, "It will be an hour and 5 minutes to -" Where, dammit?!? Where the hell am I going!?!?!

But as you can probably guess, since I'm writing here in my blog, that it was the right flight to Pittsburgh. And when I got there and went to my gate for LA, I made sure to stay off the phone. Except to call back my friend. Because I realized that I just shut off my phone, without saying "Goodbye". So I called back to let my friend know that, yes, I'm still alive. Wasn't knocked unconscious, or kidnapped by midgets wearing Elvis costumes, or *gasp* miss my flight because I was on the phone. But I kept the convo nice and short.

No more phone calls to pass the time at the airport!!!

[Updated: Thanks to Noelle for bringing back a painful memory from my trip TO Buffalo. Yes. I admit it. I should have learned my lesson when I was on the phone waiting for my 10:10pm flight TO Buffalo. There I was, chatting on the phone, and I looked at my watch and it was 10:15. I turned around, saw that the door to the gate was closed, and the monitors no longer had Buffalo on them. I ran to the main desk, cried 'Can I still get on the plane?' The lady looked at me and calmly said, 'Yes.' I looked at the closed door, then at her, pleading with my eyes for her to open it. Then she said, 'We haven't boarded it yet. We're running a little late.'

Phew!]

Posted by Yano at November 12, 2003 11:53 PM

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