The Chronic Curmudgeon

-- After the conference, I stayed at the hotel hanging out with a couple of new friends I'd met during the day. I had a red-eye scheduled, and there was no sense in sitting at Sky Harbor for six hours (had already done that at O'Hare on Thursday!). We drove back from the conference site to the hotel together... when I got to Hertz to drop off my rental car at 9 pm, I realized that in the back of the SUV was someone's travel bag and computer. Ever try to convince airline and airport personnel since 9/11 that you'd just like to drop off this bag that doesn't belong to you, and that someone you just met today will be in tomorrow morning to pick it up? I might as well have asked them where I could buy some C-4 or something. So the only solution we could think of (by now I was on the cell with the bag's owner) was to have me hail a taxi and send it back to the hotel with the bag, to be reuinited with its owner who would be waiting at the front of the hotel.

So I hailed a cab, gave the driver $20 and sent him off... and then realized what stupidity had taken over my thinking in my rush to get onto my own plane. I put $20 and a travel bag that included a laptop in a strange taxi, without getting the taxi's license number, without the bag's owner having any way to reach the driver... I figured that bag (not to mention my $20) was gone, never to be seen again. But lo and behold. 15 minutes later my phone rang... the bag's very happy owner had just taken possession of it once again. I put a laptop in a stranger's car with no way to track them down and no way to prove I'd ever seen him... and the laptop got where it was supposed to go. Yeah, you don't see that every day either. (If we'd have pulled something that stupid in New York, my friend would have spent Tuesday filing lost asset reports at the office.) Honest cabbies in Phoenix... made me feel better about the city.

-- Finally, the last thing I'd never witnessed before was a medical emergency on a plane. Our red-eye had just taken off and was in the air for all of 15 minutes when an older man (late 50s?) started wobbling back toward the back restrooms. He just didn't look right; his eyes were kind of glazed over and I honestly thought he might have had too much at the ol' tequila bar before getting airborne. I let him wobble by and turned back to try and get some sleep.

Suddenly, from behind me, I heard two loud thumps... followed by a woman calling out "help!" with increasingl insistence. I turned... and there was our wobbly passenger laying face down in the aisle. I pressed my call button, and the flight attendents came rushing back to assist him. They got him up on his hands and knees, and then I heard the sound that no one who's ever heard it can mistake... that miserable wretching noise we all make when dinner's about to make another appearance. And yes, there on his hands and knees in the aisle just in front of the airplane restroom, dude let loose. (The attendants managed to get him an airsick bag for his second bout, but I couldn't help but wonder how they didn't anticipate his first session, since his noises kind of telegraphed that it was coming.) Suddenly, there's leftovers on the floor. In the plane. In the closed, recycled air enviroment of an aircraft cabin. You can imagine the air quality issues that suddenly hit. I expected to see a repeat of the scene from "Stand By Me" when the whole town starts puking after seeing the fat kid in the pie-eating contest hurl on someone...

I figured the man was just drunk, but then the attendants got on the intercom and asked for medical personnel aboard the plane. Because I was seated near the back, I could hear the conversation between the attendants. I know I heard "divert" once, and lots of discussion of what could be done about the air quality problem in the plane.I kind of skipped past whatever else was said, and was focused on "divert"ing flights from JFK and wondered in which unplanned city I was going to spend the night. I kept stepping over both sides of the line; on the one hand, I was mighty annoyed at the guy for potentially delaying my return and for providing us all with such a wonderful aroma, while on the other I couldn't help but think in the back of my mind, "If there's something really wrong with that guy and he dies of a heart attack or something, you're chasing some seriously bad karma." Despite this understanding, I opted for the bad karma. I pulled my coat up over my face in a desperate attempt to block out the light and the smell, and started grumbling under my breath at the guy. Only occasionally did it occur to me that I'd had food poisoning before and that someone suffering from it desperately needs sympathy.

But whether it was the result of tequila or salmonella, the guy seemed to rally a little -- long enough to return to his seat anyway. We ended up not diverting, and the rest of the red-eye passed by agonizingly slowly but without incident. But... a guy laying face down in the aisle of your airplane and then gorking out an intestine into the cabin for everyone's perusal?

Now that's something you don't see every day.