Courtesy of US Airways

Today I am fly­ing to Philadel­phia for a brief week­end visit with my par­ents and a cou­ple of my sis­ters. Or rather, I am try­ing to.

Let me pref­ace all of this with a warn­ing so dire, you would be fool­hardy to ignore it: fly not on US Air­ways.

This morn­ing, while I was relax­ing at home, wife safely off to work, chil­dren in her care for the next 54 hours, I got a call. It was a record­ing, and I almost hung up in a reflex honed dur­ing this past elec­toral season.

But just as soon as I had deter­mined that this was not a Real Per­son on the other end, a multi-phonic chime of the sort you hear in an air­port told me that while not Real, this was prob­a­bly a call I should lis­ten to. US Air­ways was inform­ing me that my flight had been can­celled. Noth­ing else beyond an 800 num­ber if, IF!, I had any ques­tions. Like, what was I sup­posed to do now?

The young woman on the other end of the 800 num­ber help­fully got me a seat on another flight leav­ing at 2:30, two hours later than my orig­i­nal, arriv­ing in Philadel­phia at 9:30, five hours later than I was sup­posed to be there, with a stop in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Did I want that flight, she asked help­fully. And I refrained from sug­gest­ing that my other option seemed to be hand­ing her my ticket money and stay­ing home.

When I got to the air­port, I was informed that my 2:30 flight was now going to be tak­ing off at 4:00, and that I might have to run in DC. This with a help­ful smile.

In the end, the flight wasn’t so bad once I got off the ground. Rea­gan National Air­port even man­aged to pro­vide a vanilla milk­shake in the ter­mi­nal, which can’t be all bad. I sat next to a nice young woman from a com­pany called… Van­gard? Vagrant? I thought I’d remem­ber it, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Vagrant. And then next to a very seri­ous young man in a suit, who reminded me a lit­tle fright­en­ingly of Pee Wee Her­man crossed with Tim Roth. He spent the whole flight in zen-crazy mode, hands flat on his thighs, star­ing straight ahead. Though I did catch him nod­ding off a little.