Plane travel is like doing the laundry; it seems pretty simple as long as your parents are in charge of the details. Clothes go in here, something about detergent, blah blah blah the end. Then you get to college and finally have to do your own laundry, two months into the semester. You arrive at a laundromat, twenty pounds of laundry crammed in an overstuffed garbage bag, wearing a potato sack, and crack your knuckles. "This can't be too hard!" you think. Five minutes later sirens are blaring, men in hazmat suits are implementing Plan Delta, and newscasters across the nation are asking how we could let this happen.
In other words, the stuff you don't actually do yourself is often fraught with more peril than it seems. Plane travel is no different, and doing it alone means every little thing that goes wrong has the potential to spiral wildly out of control.
Forgotten Documents
Scenario: You arrive at check-in, where you are asked for your passport. You reach into your pocket and proudly display not your passport, but a handful of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, which then scatter humiliatingly throughout the terminal. "Uh, just a minute," you stammer, rummaging through your pockets, adding that you were just holding onto those cards for a friend. You distinctly remember that just yesterday you stopped stuffing your face with Cheez-Its long enough to put your passport right in your inside pocket, where it would be safe. You unzip your inside pocket, which contains only Cheez-Its.
What Will Happen: You will miss your flight. Weeks later, after applying for a new passport, you will discover that your passport is in your other hand, where it has been all along.
Missing Luggage
Scenario: Since you are trusting the airline to seat you in a million-pound metallic hulk filled with highly explosive jet fuel, then to propel you through the air at nearly the speed of sound, you have made the mistake of also trusting them to deliver your suitcase to you instead of chucking it into whatever random airplane is flying past at the moment. Your trust is misplaced. You arrive in Bumbletown, Nowheresville and watch the depressing baggage carousel for hours. Finally the only item that continues to circle is a wet cardboard box that says CAUTION in black marker, which you do not claim.
What Will Happen: You will be forced to purchase airport contact lens solution, which is the same as regular contact solution except that you have to sell your eyeballs to science in order to afford it.
Irritatingly Minor Delays
Scenario: Your trip consists of a baffling sequence of flights, because you could save ten bucks by flying in a huge zigzag before landing in Fresno as opposed to just flying to Fresno, and now that you're an adult you need that ten bucks for video games. Midair, the captain explains that you will lose fifteen minutes due to a route adjustment, because he sees a goose ahead. With razor-thin delays to catch all your connecting flights, you are now in a race against the clock.
What Will Happen: You fly our of your seat the moment the plane touches the runway and bound down the aisle, shouldering aside an old lady who goes tumbling out the emergency exit. You sprint to the terminal and hijack an airport cart from a guy in a wheelchair, then zoom toward your gate, plowing over an orphan. You arrive at your gate with seconds to spare, where you kick a sad clown for no particular reason. Then it turns out your plane has changed gates and you miss your flight.
Carry-On Size Limits
Scenario: A man in the middle of a hallway demands that you cram your check-in luggage into an impossibly small metal cube, or he will beat you. He does not actually say the last part but it is pretty clear from context.
What Will Happen: You struggle gamely to mash a carry-on bag that is clearly twice the size of the cube into the cube. If your dad were here, he would snap his suspenders, puff on his pipe, and take everyone out for milkshakes, or however else a reassuring dad would solve problems if it were the 1950s. But he's not, so you just burst into tears and are fined a hundred dollars.
Have you ever made any travel mistakes?
Related post: Hilarious Travel Stories from a Jet-Setting Mankler
Topics: Life
Tags: travel, airports, airplanes, adult stuff
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