Remember When The Skies Were Friendly?

Neither do I, but they weren't always this God-Awful.

The day starts with me having some coffee and waiting for the Super Shuttle. The Shuttle driver calls me to tell me he's 3 minutes away, and I get my stuff and get to the sidewalk. Once there I chat with the neighbor, on break from his daily leaf-blowing session, and after a couple minutes the Shuttle arrives. So far everything is according to script...

I was the 6th passenger on said shuttle, and the driver said we had one more stop. Cue the whining. Dude behind me starts demanding to know what the official Super Shuttle policy on stops allowed is. Seriously dude, wtf? Who Cares? There are 2 seats left on the shuttle and we're on schedule, what's the problem?

So we make the stop and pick up the passenger, then the driver goes in a way which no GPS would pick as a route to the airport. Whiney dude is muttering and guffawing the whole time, like he's expecting something more for a $20 ride to the airport. Throughout this, I was being Zen. I knew it was far too early in the day to let something like this get to me.

It turns out there was another stop (aha, this explains everything). So now the shuttle is full and we can go to the airport. The driver follows the GPS directions diligently but Whiney Dude doesn't like the way that we were going, he starts telling the driver he's going the wrong way. For a second, it seemed like we were slowing down, I really hoped the driver wasn't going to listen to WD, because then I would have had to berate WD in front of everyone including a person I took to be his daughter.

Alas, the driver played the "No English"? card (He was Chinese) and we kept going...

With all this, I was at the airport within the window acceptable window of time. Which was good, because the check-in line was a couple hundred strong. It was snaking it's way through and out the barriers down the terminal. This is bad, my morning had gone from pleasant, to frustrating, to annoying. But the line was moving.

Tangent alert: I'm sure there have been focus groups and surveys and all kinds of shit that tell the airlines that it doesn't matter how bad they treat people, as long they keep flights cheap. If that's true, why are you going Fucking Bankrupt??

The reason for the line was that the counter was severely understaffed, no surprise. But the line moved and check in was without incident. Of course check-in is only the first, and the least painful of the lines. On to security...

Again a big line, again because they only had 2 of the six stations open. I make my way through and my bag gets pulled. I follow the genius over to his little test area and he asks me "is there anything fragile or dangerous in your bag?" Uh well there's an Ipod and a camera, if you drop them, they'll break. If you try to eat the batteries, you'll probably get sick... "So I'll take that as a 'No'"? Sure, why not.

Now, I was still ok timewise, but spending 20 minutes to check in and 20 minutes to get through security was cutting into that (To be somewhat fair, I haven't waited at SFO this long in probably 3 years). Now having one of TSA's finest examine my stuff like he knows what he's looking at is starting to get annoying. I'm sitting there watching, wondering what's in the bag that made them check... Finally, at the bottom of my bag he pulls out my 10mm Combination Wrench and holds it up to a ruler. No really, he did. Then he puts everything into a plastic bin and says everything looks fine, well except that my wrench is too long so I can't take it on the plane. He then asks if I would like it disposed of, handed to someone I know, or mailed. I told him to add it to his kit and I hoped it completed the set. He says "Am I to understand you are choosing option 1?"

He the reruns all my stuff with the wrench, and it checks out, and I come to Chicago.
Thank Jeebus that the other passengers didn't have to endure me having a wrench in my bag...