Baltimore Part Dos

You all know how often I write in the consarned blog so this must be a record. I am sitting on a plane returning from Baltimore. My seat buddies are wondering just what it was this guy (me) ate to cause the noxious fumes that are emanating from my seat cushion. You all remember my discussion of crabs from yesterday. Well, I’m told they were Maryland Blue Crabs but I presume there was a few Chesapeake Farters in there as well because I am really feeling it at 39,000 feet. I blame the altitude.

Anyway, as I sit in my fragrant repose, I am watching this nice older (but not dottering) woman making her way to the front lavatory. She walked past me and went straight to the cockpit door and tried to open it with all her might. The door to the lavatory is marked as such. In fact she has had to watch a steady stream of passengers going into it for the past 45 minutes. Maybe we all had crabs yesterday. Yet she is really trying to get into the cockpit. Perhaps she has insight into a special toilet up there that will fulfill her needs better than the space-age technology in the coach lavatory. This notwithstanding there are many signs on the cockpit door:

Flight Deck
Restricted Area
Prohibido La Entrada
Ifa you enter I gonna shoot you face ( for our Italian passengers)
Hey you Lady – get the f--- out of here
Are you f-gerund stupid – this is not the toilet.
Most of these signs are in bold lettering and are even in red.

These are all actual signs on the cockpit door. If I am lying may we all be struck by lightning at this very minute. OK that was lucky.

Life if full of these sorts of people. Last month I was traveling and the nice people at Southwest Airlines announced that the TSA police would be monitoring this flight so they will be at the end of the jetway and may talk to you before you enter the plane. Now, as a certified non-terrorist, I had no problem with this. I understand the need for these spot checks and such. So I am like the 2nd person to go down the jetway. As I get there a nice man in a police-looking suit asks me for my boarding pass and my ID. Now those of you familiar with Southwest Airlines will understand just how stupid this request was. I looked at him for a few moments and responded that I would not be able to comply with his request in its entirety. For as he should know, SWA takes your boarding pass from you when you enter the jetway and I did not have it anymore. He looked at me for a few seconds and really had nothing more to say. This was our country’s response to heightened terror levels – to ask me for something they knew had just been taken from me not 20 seconds earlier. After reviewing my general demeanor he allowed me to board the plane as I appeared to pose no visible threat to him or any other person in the greater Phoenix airport. That guy has a gun. Unbelievable.

So there you go. I will try to remember to post this to the blog tomorrow morning since I had to change planes in Phoenix. Yes, I was on a flight from Baltimore through San Antonio through Phoenix to Portland. They announced just before Phoenix that they needed to put us all on a new piece of equipment (not sure why they can’t just say the plane has stopped working and we need to get you all on one that does.) So we got in the supposedly new plane and went on our way. Of course this took an hour or so. When I got in my seat there were McDonalds wrappers on the floor and in the seat pocket. They told us that this plane had been in a hangar all day and was in tip top shape. Apparently the workers in the hangar like to hang out in the plane and eat lunch. This did not inspire my confidence in SWA or in the plane. At any rate the plane seems to be working quite nicely (it has not plummeted from the sky) and I hope to make it in to Portland just about an hour late.

So there you have it. A second blog in as many days. Cherish it – it will never happen again.

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