Sing, O Muse, of the Wrath of James

Or: Life’s Not Short, It’s Long!

At this moment, I should be sailing through the skies between Dublin and New York, about to enjoy my long-awaited homecoming and see my girflriend and cats. I am, instead, in Munich, sitting on a chair emblazoned with car rental ads and designed for discomfort because I’m not yet allowed into the actual waiting area. The depths of despair into which I have sunk are kind of new to me, so I thought I would strike while the iron was hot and write about it.

The story is this: There were two legs to my flight, one from Munich to Dublin, another from Dublin to New York. Unbeknownst to me, the first flight was cancelled some weeks ago and I was booked onto a later flight to Dublin. This had me missing my connection to the second leg by six hours. This second leg of the flight was not rebooked, and per my official Orbitz page, my time to make the connection was, thus, “-6 hours”. As in, negative six hours. This would have been quite a feat even I had been aware of the change, but I was not, having received no notification and, in fact, the Orbitz page still showed me as confirmed on the morning flight, in addition to the evening flight, which discrepancy I did not note when I checked it this morning. Orbitz and Aer Lingus blame this debacle on one another, but primarily on me, for reasons that remain unclear.

The upshot is that I have been in the Munich airport for nine hours, and am looking forward to a night spent in the Dublin airport because hotel accommodation is not forthcoming, either from Aer Lingus or from Orbitz. This depite numerous fabulously expensive calls to Orbitz from a public phone, during which conversations I spun a tale of woe, Dante-esque in ingenuity, false in details but true in spirit (pennilessness, the missed wedding of a dear friend, and so on). The numerous voices on the other end were less than interested. To add insult to injury: whenever I called, I had to navigate the complex voice menu before I could be granted a live voice. I mashed “0” and asked for customer service at every opportunity, which did not perturb the pre-recorded voice. And the recorded sample that says, “Oh, you want customer service?” is actually recorded in an incredulous voice and, I swear to God, begins with a little snort of disbelief; this leads to another array of electronic options before I’m granted the opportunity to speak to the least empathetic people in the world. They had me longing for the human touch of the pre-recorded messages.

Like everyone else, I have had my share of run-ins with flight mishaps and delays, although none as serious as this or as inexplicable: this was COMPLETELY avoidable, if someone had just thought to tell me the problem, or if either Orbitz or Aer Lingus had some kind of automation that would flag obviously impossible flights that require time travel. Also my desire to come home is, this time, immense, and my time in New York was already truncated as it was.

The first few hours I think I was actually in shock (I was also tired, having woken up very early to catch a flight that did not exist). I had a desparate desire to commit some sort of violence, but all I could think to do was commit an act of violence against my own body. So I ate the biggest and most disgusting McDonal’s meal that I could find. This is the only way I can justify it in retrospect: I actually walked quite a ways, lugging all of my bags, past numerous healthy restaurants because I knew that a McDonald’s was in the distance. This made me feel better in some twisted way. Since then I have been roaming the halls of the airport, unable to concentrate enough to read. I just watched a bunch of children ice skating at a little rink outside the airport and found myself hoping (a) that the children in said rink belong to officials of Aer Lingus and Orbitz, and (b) that said rink would be struck by a comet.

It’s not so much the pragmatics of the situation: it’s the feeling of being caught, completely helplessly, in the wheels of a bureaucratic machine that seems hellbent on blaming and hurting me. That is: It’s not so much that the people don’t care: the bureaucrats to which I’ve been entrusted are surely nice people, just doing their job, and right know they’re probably listening to some poor sap whose insulin, or father’s ashes, or whatever, was dropped into the ocean. And I know, rationally, that this is simply The Way We Live Now. But, as a child of privilege, I have seldom had to face this humiliating objectification myself. Diabolically, capitalist society builds a web of goodwill and warm relations—even institutionally—around the privileged. This is especially true of academics, those with the ability and the access to discursively protest: although not financially compensated, we are protected from the ravages of institutions by well-placed phone calls and the vestiges of aristocracy that cling to the university system. I don’t really know what it’s like to have problems with health care, with visas, with the police and neither, I propose, do most people who produce the cultural capital that remains (maybe for not much longer?) necessary to prop all this up. But the airlines are different: I really am, to them, an entry in an accounts ledger and no more. I have never laid eyes on an Orbitz employee, perhaps because they only come out at night, or live in a lair at the center of the earth. But for just this reason, the airline industry is the most perfectly democratic institution that we have. It’s only here that I am actually equal: that egalité triumphs especially obviously over its brothers, liberté and fraternité.

What does this say about democracy, about our place within it?

Well that was a cathartic thirty minutes. In only three more hours I’ll be on my way to sleep in an airport!

[update: I am now in a somewhat better mood, as I’m ensconced in the Carlton Hotel, overlooking the beautiful Dublin Airport, courtesy of Aer Lingus. Against the odds, they came through in the end. I will leave the above untouched, as evidence for future generations of the despair to which modern American man will sink when faced with relatively routine airline mishaps]