Thank you for choosing Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
Big lie. No one with half the common sense God gave them CHOOSES to utilize that hellhole for their travel needs. NO ONE. It's generally taken as the necessary evil that it is. Anyone who's gone through that obstacle course knows what I'm talking about. Anyone who doesn't must experience going from Gate A9 to Gate C34 when the American Airlines TRAAIN (spelled correctly) has someone's artificial limb preventing the doors from closing somewhere in terminal B. Oh, and with 45 minutes between the flight from Florida landing and the flight to LA departing. Oh, and with two unused laptops swinging from their necks.
Oh, and then sitting on the plane 50 feet from the gate for an hour because the air traffic control forgot your plane has been ready for taxiing since the Clinton administration.
But even more horrifying was once we were airborne. I always thought we took care of that little cockpit problem. You know the one. Where people outside the cockpit can't get to the people inside the cockpit? Well, while most airlines have electric fences and air marshalls who blend in to look exactly like...well, air marshalls, this AA flight had something a little more old school. They wedge the service cart diagonally so the pilot can leave the cockpit and use the front restroom.
Now even I, at my advanced age and girth, can step onto the front armrest in First Class, hop on the service cart and jump into the fray. I'd get my ass handed to me, but what's to stop someone a little more wirey and physically fit from doing the same and slamming the cockpit door shut? Isn't the door designed to be opened only from the inside? Jeebus, if I had any faith in airline security, it was left in the tray I put my sneakers in at the checkpoint.
The bottom line is, I finally made it home from Floriduh - respelled in honor of Governor Bush's dedication to education as noted thusly:
Folks, that's not an act of vandalism. I had to get out of the car to verify. The street painters actually make note of the sohool zone so motorists will look out for the sohoolchildren coming home from sohool.
Shoot me. More on the way, including an exclusive interview with Reagan's flag-draped coffin, which wasn't buried, but is being passed across America like the Olympic torch.
