Be It Ever So Humble

Crankyjewishguy (CJG) is posting a little later than usual this morning because his flight home from San Juan was delayed for more than four hours yesterday, a ripple effect from the Blizzard of Oh-ten, and he got in very late last night. And being just a wee bit compulsive, he couldn't go to sleep without unpacking, watering the plants, doing the laundry, and returning a call from the MasterCard early fraud detection unit who wanted to know if CJG used his card to buy a baked stuffed potato for $5.84 in Puerto Rico. (No, CJG is not kidding.) Normally, all of this, especially the anxiety producing airport delay, would make CJG very irritable but there was a guy at the San Juan airport who'd been there for three days trying to get back to New York and the earliest flight they could give him was January 2. CJG doesn't delight in the misery of others; once in a while he uses it to put his own into perspective, though mostly he simply wallows in his own little miseries regardless of the calamity that has befallen the next guy. But stuck in an airport for seven days? Now that's misery. Who among us is as lucky as this girl, who only needs to click her heels to get home?

With tens of thousands of travelers stranded in airports, who doesn't
despise this lucky girl and her three enablers?

At the airport CJG observed a fundamental law of human nature: that the more anxious people are to get going, the more they will act in ways designed to further delay the proceedings. When the plane that would fly 180 weary travelers back to Boston finally arrived, people rushed the gate area even though it would be another 90 minutes or so until the plane left because of government overregulation of the airline industry. For some reason the bureaucrats at the FAA have one rule that states that arriving passengers actually have to be allowed to leave the plane before departing passengers can board and another that says no plane can fly without a pilot. Since the crew that flew our plane in had maxed out their flying time for that day, the airline scrambled to find a pilot, at one point offering a free round trip anywhere in the continental United States to anyone willing to fly the plane to Boston. People mobbed the gate even though they knew when the time did finally come to board, we'd be boarding by row numbers, not based on whoever was a big enough douche bag to push their way to the front like they do in Tajikistan. And once the boarding announcement was made asking everyone to please clear the aisle so those whose row numbers were called could actually get to the fucking plane, these people simply moved imperceptibly to one side or the other and made a big fuss doing so as if they'd been massively inconvenienced. Having staked out their little piece of territory for an hour they were loathe to give it up.  Hence, the boarding procedure looked like this:

Eager passengers in San Juan rush to board Flight 734 for Boston.

That's when CJG realized that there's really only one thing that makes him cranky. Other people,