everyone take a nice break since the last post? i did. i ate some chex mix. yeah, that's right, somebody knows how to plan. also, want to point out that there is an abandoned book on a table in this airport called The Red Queen. my experience at the spy museum in DC leads me to believe this must be a spy drop point. maybe i should check it out and become a spy. i seem to have messed up my internal clock pretty good right now and am ready for another day...SPY
right. where were we? ah that's right.
OR IS IT??
about 30 minutes into the actual flight, the polite pilot comes on the PA (which is terrifying and loud when you have the headphones in. i jumped every time he announced anything. it was noticeable).
“So you may have noticed that we've turned around. We've uh..got a slight maintenance problem ..and uh ..we need to go back to Newark to check it out. This is not an emergency, we just uh want to make sure we take all safety precautions”
seemed like nothing was on fire, so I just shrugged, watched the ad on my tv telling me I should pay for the inflight tv, and ate my pretzels. But clearly the majority of the people on the plane starts freaking out and become convinced we are about to die a horrible fiery death.
Static “Welcome to Newark! I uh.. hope the firetrucks and emergency crews on either side of the plane didn't alarm you. It's just protocol. We uh .. didn't ask for them due to the MINOR nature of this problem..so uh, sorry about that”
people on the plane are murmuring through it all saying things like 'yeah, right. Not an emergency.' listen folks. I don't know how to tell you this, but if it was an emergency, the crews would actually be doing something and we wouldn't just be sitting there twiddling our thumbs. at least, I was twiddling.
Nothing was on fire, by the way, some sort of maintenance door got a bit flappy in the flight. They weren't sure if it was left open or came open during the flight. I should hope it just came open, or the guy in charge of closing that door needs to be backhanded. If my mom's car flips out every time I don't immediately put my seatbelt on, surely an airplane can have a flappy open door warning light.
Static “So uh, we've just found out that two of our flight attendants are illegal... (BIG pause here by the pilot, I thought for sure he was going to follow this with 'immigrants' and I just started laughing)... are illegal because they have been in the air too long (technically we havent really 'been in the air'..). So uh, we've got one flight attendant at the airport and we've got about 40 minutes before another one can arrive.”
another half hour or so of people rabble rousing and the pilot comes back on:
“uh yeah, so just a little more time before we can get that second flight attendant. If any of you wish to not continue flying, let us know. (Again, they are being very loose with this 'flying' nonsense.) for the rest of you, if you'd uh like to get off the plane and get some food, you may do so at this time. Unfortunately, we uh don't have any complimentary food on this flight (slight murmurs of outrage), but uh the direct tv will be free for everyone for the duration of the flight.
Everyone who was just mad now rejoices. AMERICA LOVES FREE TV. I just ate my pretzels and laughed every time the poor guy had to make an announcement. I was really running low on pretzels.
So we all get off the plane, which is a plan that could be disaster. I buy a protein bar and some chex mix (note: I hate chex mix now, I just ate about 3 servings of it. Vomit)
I sit down in the middle of the airport floor to charge my phone and decide to call anita, figuring she would try to check the status and would assume I died a horrible fiery death. Interestingly, several times when I tried to check the status of the flight I just got weird error messages. I would assume these error messages mean things like 'i'm terribly sorry but we have NO idea where this plane is or IF this plane is, please check back in a bit and hopefully no one will have died a horribly fiery death.' It is a bit sketchy, to be fair.
We somehow all make it back on the plane in a timely fashion and the poor pilot apologetically tells us that we have to watch the safety video again. The safety video includes an introduction by the CEO of continental. People were shaking their fists, muttering hateful things, mocking, and laughing. I wish I could have recorded this for a sound company's “disgruntled crowd murmurs before riot” track.
So we fly and we fly and we fly and we land.
The most unbelievable thing that happened today:
I WATCHED AN EPISODE OF SEINFELD I HAD NEVER SEEN BEFORE.
