stylin' and profilin'

we went home!

derek had to do some work in texas, which naturally led to the short jaunt further north. he decided i should join him for the visit. how could a girl resist the chance to go and dork out with some favorite home-chickens? good times had by all, lots of food eaten, cigarettes smoked, water consumed, blah bitty blah. we'll get to that craziness in a later update.

as for the travel, it was a bumpity ride. my superstitious side is getting the better of me as i get on towards curmudgeonhood. it should have served as an early warning system in this instance. bells and whistles were supposed to be looking out for me to let me know the shit was heading towards the fan. i should have known i was in for a jolt from the time i left the house.

ever since security became paramount at airports after the terrorist attacks, i have been repeatedly profiled, searched, wanded, and all other manner of targeted. it's difficult to say exactly what it is about me that screams "hey, look out for the stubby chick with the dirty mouth and coffee on her shoes," but my je ne sais quoi has apparently put me on some kind of watch list. turning my palms to the sky and opening my bag while going through the beepy gate a number of times is a normal occurrence for me anymore. i've even started to calculate the extra time it's going to take for us to get through security as part of my trip. oh, and if it isn't my brown person's last name or stray nail file that slows us down, it's derek's computer and virtual shopping cart of electronics he's toting in that backpack of his. between the two of us we're an elite team of slowpokey risks to national safety. (i still have yet to figure out how he can get through a trip with no identification and i can get a car out of a los suck-eles garage with nothing but my charm and various monkey noises.) it's a wonder we get anywhere on time.

so this time when i went through the gate at burbank, i was ready for the treatment, BUT NO! they let me through with not so much as a "could you step to the side please?" or a squinty look. it was fucking amazing! not only had i remembered to go back to the house and take care of the coffeemaker and trash, i had also secured a window seat, ON THE EXIT ROW, and gotten through to the plane with zero incident and very little waiting.

furthermore, when i stopped in dallas (at DFW, the hub from hell) i was only three gates away from my connecting flight. this kind of luck is unheard of in a city that's been serving as my personal pit of doom for most of my life. i got to smoke two whole cigarettes whilst calling veronica and had the smoothness of getting back through security in less than five minutes. for the second time in one trip i had avoided the fate of the wand. to top the extravaganza of "who did i blow in a past life to have this spot of happiness?" i was experiencing, both flights landed early with no stinky people or crying children anywhere near me... on a holiday weekend, no less! jackpot!!!

you know how the rest goes from here, don't you?

our returning flight was supposed to take off tuesday afternoon. we got to the tulsa airport, fumbled through security with derek's computer getting so many x-rays that i was starting to wonder when the doctors would declare it had a rare form of usb port cancer with no cure. i'd spent my time playing strip poker with anything even remotely metal, short of undergarments, until the damn machine stopped beeping. they finally let us run off to (the wrong) gate and wait for a flight that wasn't coming due to weather delays. we were shuffled to another flight in record time. i asked about sitting by the exit and we were just getting comfy when the lady across the aisle put the bad luck whammy out there in full volume within earshot of several rows.

"wow, this row is great! i have sooooo much room to stretch. i bet i could lay down and take a nap over here. look at me! even with my short legs i can tell a difference in how much space is here. i feel sorry for those other people." she must have meant the people in the immediate area who were craning their necks to glare at anyone seated in an exit row with that extra leg room. all i can think is bitch shut up and stop tempting fate here, okay? but fate stepped in and left us on that airplane waiting for weather updates. with the engine not running and no air conditioning, it just kept getting hotter as they shoved even more people on the plane to fill all the rows. we were in serious danger of losing our scammed-on exit seats when it was announced that all flights to dallas that night were cancelled and we'd have to schlep up to the counter for a rebooked flight. ugh.

after a phone call to nick so he could turn around and fetch us, we waited. we waited in line. we waited in line a really long time. nick parked and waited for us. nick got dirty looks for parking in the passenger pickup zone. nick circled enough times to get a qualifying time at the slowest racetrack in the world. we rebooked. for thursday at the buttcrack of dawn. they said that everything from six different airlines was already booked and there was no way to get us on our way any sooner. woe to us, with no chance of freebies to ease our struggle because it was a weather delay that caused the ruckus.

no matter to that. the delays had given us a bonus day with tulsa and we could always call reservations later in the night, which derek did. by this time i was beginning to learn that whomever can stay on hold with customer service the longest is the winner. when he explained to american that a two day delay was unreasonable due to missed work and extra money spent on staying in tulsa, they were sympathetic. they were extremely courteous. they put him on hold to go check with a supervisor about compensation and he promptly got disconnected. he sighed and called back to go through the story again with a new person. this time derek was also armed with flight numbers of available tickets from three other airlines. surely they'd have to get us out of there on wednesday, right? turns out the answer is a yes! they could only delay us a reasonable amount of time, even due to weather, and derek was greedy enough to wait on hold for half an hour until we got booked for wednesday evening on a united flight. we even got to go first class out of denver. problem solved and upgrade included. rock stars, indeed.

at least derek got booked for that time. unbeknownst to us, they had fucked up my reservations and put me on a different, earlier flight. without getting an immediate email confirmation from american, and because we are trusting people, we didn't think to look at my itinerary when we got up the next morning. we were going to print out boarding info when he saw that i was supposed to leave HOURS AGO from the time we thought we were both scheduled. another call to the powers that be and we got me rearranged. for the third time in less that 24 hours. sheesh, shit, motherfucker.

of course they had no record of me being corrected at the counter. united also had my itinerary as flying into burbank from denver on wednesday, but not even leaving tulsa to denver until thursday. am i dr. who here?!? more polite begging and pleading from us followed, mostly because nick would have just been pulling in to the parking garage at his building by this point and i could only make him drive around the airport so many times in one week.

good-natured cajoling can pay off if you do it just right. after explaining what had been going on for the past day, they rebooked me into the flight and gave us boarding passes. when we got to the checkpoint where they ask for identification, we were given bright orange tags and told to use the orange buckets for our stuff. of course! things were finally going our way! we were getting the security treatment that had been our par from flights gone by. this time we even had to step into little corrals like we were racing dogs! our bags were laid out like it was a drug intervention and we shuffled over to the mats with our shoes in little trays.

it's funny how hard it can be to explain to the transit security workers why you're happy to be felt up and searched in front of the pointing and whispering onlookers. the nice lady was as professional as could be when she touched all the metal parts on my bra. "now i'm not going to give you an exam or anything," she said as she stuck the wand halfway up my skirt. "i'll just be brushing past the inside of your leg a little." i just laughed and told her how i was actually feeling more comfortable about our trip now that we'd been stopped. she giggled and shook her head, but did take the time to compliment my fluevogs and ask where i got them. rubber-soled heels are the best, you know.

what set it off this time? seems as if the trigger could have been so many multiple rebookings within such a short time. derek whipping out half of the nation's laptop computers and a few other geek gadgets probably didn't help. for all anyone else knows it was just my massive underwires. what i can tell you is this - life was some brilliant sailing after that. all systems go, all things easy. not even a jog to our next gate in denver could phase us. hauling ass to a gate is supposed to be part of the plan in our travels. and hey, it got us to first class that much quicker.

from now on i'm going to request to be profiled in the airport. i'll get on bended knee and squeal like a crack whore for more security. it's the only way i can think of to keep the universe in line. we'll all be safer in the end with me and derek setting an example for america. beep beep beep. bring on the magic wand.