Airport karma and its importance

As this week marks the first time that more than one person in my family has gone back to Taiwan and I have not [in other words, each of my parents has gone to Taiwan individually, but anytime more than one person goes, I have gone as well], I figure it is a good time to tell some tales of my adventures at the airport. I’ve done a lot of domestic flying in the last couple years, and as a result, I have quite a few tales to tell. As the title of this post suggests, I believe that having good airport karma is an important, useful, and stress-relieving thing to have in your back pocket.

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Act One: The “Special Line” through security doesn’t depend on your level of importance– it actually depends on your level of desperation

You know how parents tell little kids white lies just to get them to do certain things? Some thing to the effect of “oh, if you don’t clean your room, X-bad-thing will happen to you” or “if you swallow watermelon seeds, a watermelon will grow in your stomach”– well, to some extent, I believe that 95% of the time, you don’t need to get to the airport 2 hours before your flight leaves [unless you are flying internationally, to be clear]. Twice, at the Austin airport, I’ve had a flight scheduled to leave really early in the morning, and in all of my absentminded-brilliance, I arrived ~45-60 minutes before my flight’s departure time. The first time was en route to a grad school visit on the East Coast; I arrived to the airport the Friday morning before ACL… and chaos ensued. I checked luggage quickly and then felt overwhelmed by the security line… until I noticed the really short line off to the side and thought to myself “sure why not”. The second time was en route back to San Diego after a trip to Austin, and without any luggage to check, I was still way far way behind in the security line– and even after negotiating with the airline counter and asking them if I could pay $50 extra for an express pass, I just disregarded their looks of disapproval and ran off to the express line anyway.

And the outcome both times? I made it through the express security check line in a matter of minutes and scrambled at break-neck pace to my gate and got on my planes. Seriously, they’re playing mind games with the “express security check” line’s requirements. Maybe one just has to look very desperate…

Act Two: Another reason why I hate the cold

In every basic chemistry class, there comes a point where you teach students about different temperature scales. Right- we all grow up with Fahrenheit in our heads, and then we learn that Celsius exists… and then we find the latter is based on the the Kelvin scale? You then learn that zero Kelvin is the temperature at which all kinetic movement ceases. Well, there is some magical temperature temperature at which all airport check-in efficiency ceases and waiting in line becomes an infinitely long process. Of course, this situation happened to me on my flight back to San Diego after winter break… resulting in a missed flight [and thereby a missed connection], so I got put on a later flight that went out of the way [eastward then westward] which had a delayed second connection. AIRPORT EQUIVALENT OF ZERO KELVIN… guh.

Act Three: When you fly standby…

Flying standby is the number one way to cash in all of your good airport karma. Standby means you feel the weight of the world on your shoulders as you cross your fingers and toes hoping to hear your name called so that you can get where you need to go instead of sitting in those god-awful airport seats for another hour or two. Once your name gets called though, it’s like winning 100 games of BINGO back-to-back; yeah, it feels that good. Also, flying standby means that one gets very little sleep: not only do you barely sleep the night before going to wait in line for a standby flight, but you get in line at the crack of dawn before the sun rises in order to try and get on the least crowded flight of the day at some ridiculously early time. Still, I imagine winning the lottery must feel a lot like having your name called for standby.

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