some flying lessons and why women cry

Slightly abridged (and improved?) version of the long, rambling, sloppily written post of last night:

Flying back from New Orleans last week, I missed my connecting flight in Chicago despite the more than an hour and half in between flights, mostly because American Airlines sucks, but partly because I failed to be proactive. Some dos and don’ts:

• Do not check your luggage in when you have a connecting flight (one of the few things I did right, although not without AA giving me trouble about it), or they’ll surely lose it.
  
• When your first flight is delayed by ½ hour to start with, take it as a bad sign.
  
• If they assign you a seat in the very last row of the aircraft, insist that they move you forward in the plane to assure that you can deplane in time to make your connecting flight.
  
• When you touch down at 7:15 and your next flight is at 7:50 PM, and then comes the dreaded announcement that the plane has to taxi for “a bit” before parking at the gate, pester the travel agent to call the gate of your next flight and have them wait for you. Furthermore, if you didn’t manage to avoid sitting in the back of the plane, get permission to walk up to the front of the plane so that you get off immediately and make a dash to your gate without having to wait for hundreds of exceedingly slow passengers to make their way off the plane before you.
  
• When you get off the plane at 7:43, even though you should technically have 7 minutes to get to your next gate, assume the worst, and RUN.

So everything that could possibly go wrong, goes wrong, excepting that I did have my luggage with me, when I arrive at the gate at 7:47 PM (3 minutes to spare!) starving, with a splitting headache from sitting in the very noisy last row of the plane, and completely exhausted from a few days worth of sleep deprivation and spending the good part of the day painting a public school, when I see my plane driving away from the gate without me! Not only was it extremely annoying that the plane was leaving the gate early when they surely knew that I was on the ground in Chigaco, but I was almost insulted that the plane left without me.

Shortyly after watching my plane drive off without me, AA gives me a seat on the next flight out 2 hours later that wouldn't arrive in Boston until the disagreeable hour of 1 AM, and then they brush me off. When I attempt to plead my case and get some sort of compensation for the trouble they, I find myself oddly choking up, and have to walk away to avoid bursting into tears in front of the agent. Walking through the airport with tears streaming down my face, I had no idea what came over me. I, who cry on average twice a year, and only with very good reason, was crying essentially over spilt milk. It was beyond my comprehension what was happening to me; although, I admit, crying in airports has somewhat of a dramatic element to it, and since I would never see anyone in that airport again, it wasn’t really too embarrassing to be seen crying like a 12 year old girl. So I enjoyed the moment on some level, then regain composure to take up my case with another agent. I manage to get a voucher to pay for my cab ride home, but not without breaking into tears again!

So I relate this rather embarrassing account of my crying while knowingly aware of how utterly pathetic it was to be crying essentially over 2 hours of lost sleep, mostly because I’m fascinated by the fact that I cried for no justifiable reason like millions of women do everyday, and want to share my slightly improved understanding of the phenomena.

When I told my female friends about how odd it was for me to sporadically cry like that, none thought it was too unusual, said that there’s something about feeling alone and helpless in an airport that makes one prone to tears (although, highly unlikely to have the same effect on men), and then 3 out of 4 recounted their own airport sob story. So what is that makes us women folk cry? The invisible hand of G-d.