Waiting for the Plane

I’m at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Terminal C, gate 14, waiting to board a flight to Santa Ana, California. I’m headed to the VEX Robotics World Championship event in Anaheim where I’ll be shooting photos. It’s also the first time I’ve flown in nearly a year.

As usual, I forgot to eat breakfast this morning. There’s a Wendy’s directly across from gate 14, so I walk over and order a breakfast sausage biscuit; Wendys’ version of an Egg McMuffin. The Wendys is chaotic. There’s a guy dissasembling a deep fryer, pulling out a grunge-encrusted pump. There are several people running around behind the counter preparing orders. A manager is training someone at the register. Orders are taking a long time.

I finally get my Wendy’s McBreakfast thing and hunt down an unoccupied seat at a row of tables. Like the Wendy’s itself, the sausage biscuit is suprisingly random. McDonalds Egg McMuffins are precisely shaped, each identical to the one before and the one after. But this looks like someone literally fried an egg in a pan and plopped it onto a randomly shaped biscuit. I drink my tiny plastic cup of orange juice to cut through the greasy fast food taste left from the biscuit.

There’s no recycle bin. Nobody recycles at airports. Everything is trash; the paper bag, the plastic cup. Maybe they sort out the recyclables later? I doubt it. I pick up my laptop bag and the new camera bag I’m trying out. I bought it at Fry’s last night. It’s a backpack style bag. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll return it when I get back to Dallas.

I’m assuming I’ll get back of course. I think about statistics. The odds against winning the lottery are millions to one but when the prize is big enough, we buy a ticket and hope to be that one in a million. The odds of dying in a plane crash are also millions to one but, when we fly, we hope we’re not the one. Being lucky doesn’t always mean beating the odds. Just to be safe, I buy one of those inexpensive travelers insurance policies.

On the way back to gate 14, I see a newstand and decide to check out the books. I usually take a book or two along on flights but didn’t have one handy this morning. It’s been a while since I’ve been in an airport bookstore. I’m disappointed to see there’s no science fiction. There are lots of supernatural/fantasy books about witches, wizards, and vampires. The only thing that’s even close to science fiction is The Hunger Games. I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago, so it doesn’t interest me much. I make my way back to the gate without a book. The plane should be here soon.

Syndicated 2012-04-20 07:16:17 from Steevithak of the Internet