Actually, it’s not Kansas that I hate. It’s the airport in Wichita. It seemed that as I got further from the airport, the levels of Hell were ascending, rather than descending, so as opposed to being trapped in a ring of hell where hungry badgers were fighting in my rectum and the winner was declared when one badger would puncture another badger’s backpack full of rubbing alcohol and gasoline while old men took bets that I was consistently losing, I was instead in a circle of Hell where you ask for Sprite and they tell you they only have 7up. I’m sure that if I had gotten further away from the airport I would have been able to leave Hell altogether… ha ha, I’m just kidding. I was still in Kansas after all.
When we were flying from Baltimore to Chicago, the weather was fine, and the flight was unremarkable. However, apparently the pilots had a little too much to drink in the Windy City, because they made Evil Knievel look like a little girl in a tutu jumping over puddles while they were flying us into Wichita.
See, Wichita had just been subjected to a string of horrible storms that were threatening to turn into tornadoes, and the storms were directly on the flight path. The pilot came over the PA and told the cabin that we could spend an extra 30 to 45 minutes flying around the storms and coming up from the south to land, or he could toss back another shot of Wild Turkey, take his pants off, and fly us right through the storms.
Clearly, I wouldn’t be blogging about this if he hadn’t chosen to treat the plane like his own personal testicle massager.
To say we hit air pockets and turbulence would be like saying that the Donner party had become a bit peckish. The plane rattled like an epileptic vibrator on a combination of PCP and about 348 pixie sticks. It was like when you swerve too far to the left or right on the highway, and your tires hit the rumble strips until you pull back onto the highway, drunkenly navigating yourself homeward. Only it felt like the rumble strips were as big as speed-bumps, and that the pilot was unable, or unwilling, to pull off of them.
It was too loud to hear people throwing up, but I knew there was some post-lunch evacuations going on by how frequently the stewardi were travelling up and down the aisle with soggy, stinking trashbags.
About 2 minutes before landing, when we finally passed through the back end of the storm, I imagined the pilot finished himself off and put his pants back on, and shortly after we were on the runway. They pulled a set of stairs up to the plane so we could get out, and the first thing that I noticed about the airport in Wichita was that tumbleweeds were blowing across the tarmac. In fact, a tumbleweed had become stuck in the stairwell that led from the tarmac to the gate. It was an accurate omen for my time in Kansas.
Then I did some stuff for two days, most of it relatively uninteresting, with the most interesting parts being of the variety upon when I relate the story to you, you chuckle politely and I then posit that the story would have been better had you been there.
Sunday I went back to the airport and I checked in without a problem. However, the idiotic Kansan fuckwits suffering from delusions of grandeur had decided to implement the most draconian security procedures they could imagine. And I can certainly understand why Kansans would be worried, what with not a god-damned thing worth targeting by terrorists existing within the borders of their entire state.
So, as I’m about to walk through the metal detector, the bitch behind the x-ray machine tells me that I have to take my shoes off before I go through. Now, I don’t travel every single day, but I travel enough to know how to dress myself when I go to the airport, and I make sure that I’m not wearing any metal, so I won’t set off any alarms that will slow me down. I wasn’t wearing a belt, and my shoes had no metal in them, so I figured I could just walk through.
“My shoes don’t have any metal in them. I won’t set off the metal detector.”
“Doesn’t matter, you have to take your shoes off.”
“Why? They don’t have any metal in them.”
“Your shoes fit a profile. Take them off, or we’ll subject you to a full search.”
Apparently the bitch on the power trip was determined to abuse every ounce of authority that her plastic TSA badge provided. However, I didn’t really want her fingers up my ass, so I just took my shoes off and kept my comments about her using the fourth amendment for toilet paper to myself.
I went through the metal detector and shockingly did not set it off, and though my shoes “fit a profile” they were not actually intercontinental ballistic missiles, so I was able to put them back on at the end of the conveyor belt, close enough to hear the bitch get even dumber.
The guys in line behind me were from Poland. It said so on their passports, and they were speaking Polish. The only one of them that spoke any English was the teenager with them, and they sent him through the metal detector first, and told him to move out of the way once he’d gone through. And even though they make people take their shoes off like they have some kind of foot fetish, they only provided two chairs for people to use to get their shoes back on, so the Polish kid was well beyond earshot once he found a seat to put on his shoes. No more Polish to English translations for the bitch working security, and she did it to herself.
The last Polish guy in the group couldn’t answer any of the “security” questions being asked of him, so things in the line behind the metal detector were getting a little hectic. Here’s how it went.
TSA Bitch: Do you have any camera equipment in your belongings?
Polish guy: Eh?
TSA Bitch: (loud and slow) Do you have-o any camera-o equipment-o?
Polish guy: (smiles and shrugs)
TSA Bitch: (to Metal Detector Guy) These guys don’t hablo any English. He doesn’t even know if he has a camera. (chuckles)
I’m sure you can see that there are about three dozen things wrong with the way this woman, and I hesitate to use this word so loosely, thinks. Compound her idiocy with the dumbness of the situation that my Polish flight-mates and I had just gone through, and I’m pretty sure that our flights are no more safe than they were before, but now they are assuredly more pissed off. Thanks for flying the friendly fucking skies.
And that’s the last that I’ll say about Kansas.
Except that it sucks.
Fuckers.