I hate people who tweet from the airport
But I get it. The flight’s delayed. The food is terrible (see below). The gate agent was mean and took away your blankie. It’s no wonder air travel is the Lingua Franca of standup comedy: there’s a unendingly rich vein to mine.
But it’s been done to death. And with the novelty of air travel long past, it gets interesting only through competitive hyperbole.
So, when I tell you the plane arrived early into San Francisco, but I still missed my connection to Phoenix because we sat on the tarmac for 45 minutes, you wave your hand and say, “Feh, that’s nothing” and explain how your daughter missed the entire second semester of third grade because they wouldn’t taxi the plane to the gate. And when I complain about the burnt coffee, bland croissant and belligerent service at the airport food court, you roll your eyes and tell me how good I have it, how once you found an entire human hand in your soup and how you were forced to eat it by the airport restaurant staff under penalty of caning while the other patrons ransacked your luggage and made lude suggestions about the origins of the stains on your dirty laundry. And when I recount with just a little bit of frustration how my cramped seat didn’t recline and my neighbor prevented me from sleeping on my 6 a.m. flight by snoring and jerking herself awake every few minutes, you reveal the source of your anger issues as the episode on a Delta flight when the entire cabin was taken over by a deaf brass marching band who insisted on practising their entire repertoire for four hours straight on a cross-country trip, which was actually a pleasant respite from the convicted murderer who kept trying to carve the initials of his victims in your arm with the shiv he made from a coffee stir stick and how you were doing fine until he started to carve *your* initials and laugh maniacally all the way through the landing, only to disappear after the flight and resurface every Christmas when he sends you a personal holiday card signed “love and kisses” just below the pornographic sketch of his private parts he doodles every year, this last one in pastels which made it just that much more creepy, somehow. So, yeah, air travel sucks. But please don’t tweet about it. Besides, if you think you have it bad, wait until I tell you my story…
