Dear Travel: Going

Dear Delta Airlines Email Flight Alert Message:
Thank you for letting me know my flight was delayed two hours. Next time, please don't wait until I have driven 80 miles to the airport to tell me. Please tell me before I leave the house.

Dear Transportation Security Administration:
Thank you for keeping me safe. Thank you for checking my shoes for explosive materials that didn't work even when that schmuck actually was able to sneak them onto the plane in his shoes. Thank you for making me remove my belt, cell phone, laptop, jacket, coin, keys, watch, and dignity in order to travel like a sheep on a cramped plane that will end up being three-and-a-half hours late.

Dear Woman Who Sat Two Seats Away From Me In a Nearly Empty Airport Terminal:
Please don't take out your cell phone and speak at the top of your lungs while I'm trying to ignore you. I don't want to break out my iPod to drown out your obnoxious blather, but I will if I have to. Not that you'll notice...

Dear LaGuardia Airport Service Truck Driver:
Thank you for driving your vehicle into the side of my airplane, thereby putting it out of service and requiring it to be replaced with the soda pop can that eventually took us to Columbus, OH. I had to allow the TSA security team get to second base with me just to be allowed to sit inside the plane, yet you were paid good money to do more damage than any terrorist has managed in almost ten years.

Dear Self-Flushing Toilet at RDU Airport:
I'm not getting up, so please don't flush simply because I lean forward a little to wipe my butt. It is a predictably necessary step in the whole "going to the bathroom" process and shouldn't come as a surprise to you. Dropping my trousers and sitting in the sink with the faucet running could not possibly dampen my derriere more than your swirling mist did just now.

Dear Man Who Sat In The Seat Vacated By The Woman Who Sat Two Seats Away From Me And Spoke Loudly Into Her Cell Phone:
Please don't speak so loudly into your cell phone.

Dear Transportation Security Administration:
When will the current safety advisory level no longer be orange? Aside from the fact orange holds no value to me as an indicator of degree of threat, its constant use is rendering it meaningless. An occasional dip to yellow might make us stop and take notice the next time we hear the man with the rod up his butt tell us the current threat advisory level is orange.

Dear Chautauqua Airlines, Regional Operator for Delta:
Thank you for keeping my ticket price low by eliminating the costly padding that might otherwise separate my tailbone from the hard plastic directly beneath the faux leather upholstery of your seats.

Dear Chautauqua Airlines:
Should I be concerned that you had to move two passengers from their front-of-the-plane seats to the very back rows in order to achieve the proper weight distribution for a safe flight? And what was that high-pitched whirring noise just before that deafening alarm sounded?

Dear Chautauqua Airlines:
Instead of removing the safety instructions from the seatback pocket in front of me to review with the flight attendant, can I instead remove my Diet Coke and chocolate malted milk balls from the seatback pocket in front of me and pretend to pay attention to the flight attendant while I drink and eat them?

Dear Man In the Seat Across the Aisle From Me:
Please stop being you. Every single thing you've done since I sat down has annoyed me.

Dear Chautaqua Airlines:
Is the seatback pocket in front of me water-tight? Because I'm starting to think mixing Diet Coke with chocolate malted milk balls on a plane this small was a bad idea, and those little paper bags are nowhere near big enough to hold everything I've just consumed.

Dear Mousy Granola-Head Woman Who Sat Behind Me On The Plane:
In case you weren't aware, there is such a thing as air travel etiquette. You should not have reached your undeodorized armpit over my head to get your bag down and then pushed ahead three rows closer to the door before anyone else had started moving. I saw you collect your bag and head for the parking garage, so don't even tell me you were late for a connecting flight.

Dear Non-English-Speaking Taxi Driver:
Yes, your cab is very clean and you seem like a nice person. I'm just wondering why your meter seems to be in its own plane of existence in which time runs slower, thereby costing me significantly more than any other cab has ever cost me to get from the airport to my downtown hotel. You were doing eighty on the highway and you had to stop at only one light, so why do I owe you $20?

© 2011 Mark Feggeler

Prescription Lies

Now that the airlines have figured out how not to be a bunch of big fat liars when it comes to arrival and departure times, we need to get other industries to follow suit.

Oh, sure, we could target Amtrak, or doctors, or dentists, or appliance service companies. They all have tremendous room for improvement.

You seriously want me to believe you can't pin down to within a two-hour window what time of day you'll be dropping by to tell me you don't have the right parts in the van to fix our washing machine? I've really got to wait around in the hopes you'll show up sometime between 8:00am and 4:00pm? That isn't an appointment, it's an entire workday! You might as well schedule yourself to stop by sometime between April and June.

As frustrating as it may be to wait two hours past your appointment time for a doctor who would happily charge you $50 if you arrived at his office ten minutes late, the most important first target of the timeliness initiative must be the Walmart pharmacy.

Last night, I arrived at Walmart well before 6:00pm and handed over three simple prescriptions to the young lady working the Drop Off counter. While at the store, I planned to pick up some grape juice -- apparently our kids are trying to turn their insides purple by drinking thirty-seven gallons of grape juice each week -- so I asked the young lady how long it would take for them to prepare my prescriptions. Her answer: thirty minutes.

I peeked over at the six people busily at work behind the pharmacy counter. I glanced around me at the two people waiting for their prescriptions. I decided the young lady's time estimate was reasonable and sauntered over to the grocery aisles.

Twenty-five minutes later I returned to find a changed landscape.

Instead of six employees filling prescriptions, there were now only two. Where one coughing elderly man had sat alone on a metal bench waiting for his name to be called, three such men now sat. They hacked and wheezed in unison, creating a 30-foot no fly zone for anyone interested in avoiding the mystery grab-bag of contagion they were spreading. Three women hovered with their shopping carts around the pharmacy registers. They all shot dirty looks my way as I approached one of the registers to ask about my prescriptions.

"The pharmacist has yours finished but he's still working on your wife's," the cashier told me.

The pharmacist. You mean the guy in the white lab coat who, the entire time I've been shopping, has been standing there with an empty canister in one hand, a bunch of capsules in the other, and staring blankly at the computer monitor like he's never seen one before? That pharmacist? Well, how much longer does he think it will take?

"About twenty more minutes," she says.

Okay. I can handle another twenty minutes. The store is big, there's plenty to keep me distracted while I wait for twenty more minutes of my life to pass me by. Only it took a lot longer than twenty minutes. At the end of twenty minutes I was told it would be another ten minutes, then another ten, and then only five which actually lasted fifteen.

To make a long story short, at 7:30pm I left the store with my prescriptions. What started as a quick trip to the store turned into a two-hour adventure in waiting at Walmart.

I realize I could have left at any point but once you've invested enough time you have to see it through. Like watching a bad movie, you know it's only going to get worse the more you watch but you're more than halfway through and might as well stick it out to the end.

Next time, no matter what is prescribed, I'm just going to pick up a bottle of Flintstone chewable vitamins and pretend they are whatever medicine my doctor ordered.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler