The wife and I are back home after another weekend trip to Northern Virginia. I know I promised to post the name of that choleric woman at the check-in counter, but —
alas! — she was off-duty
again. It is clear to me now that the counter lady is scared to death of this weblog and running. Because she has ready access to the database of ticketholders, she can make regular queries about the upcoming flight dates of one Phutatorius, and she calls in sick on those days. Well, shame on you, brown haired D.C. National Airport US Airways Shuttle Check-In Counter Woman. Shame on you, indeed — I had regarded you as a worthier adversary than this. I had never known you to run from a fight or shrink from a confrontation before now.
In other news, airport security held up my wife for twenty minutes after her Birkenstocks tested positive for explosives. She was asked, as the searchers commenced a second run-through of her carry-on bags, if she had "walked on grass lately." Apparently shoes can pick up trace amounts of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that the government recognizes — and appropriately so, after Oklahoma City — as bomb-making material. And indeed she had been gamboling playfully across her father's yard earlier that day — well, carrying luggage to the street, anyway — so there you have it. Case closed.
Now if you'll just give us your name, address, phone number, occupation, and place of business for our files, we'll let you go. The wife did surrender that information and ultimately fared quite a bit better than the gentleman next to her, in whose possession Security had found two .22 slugs. Last we saw of him he was seated in a chair, trying to explain to the gathering swarm of TSA infantry, supervisors, and state police that he'd spent the afternoon at a shooting range.
Now I know I
don't need to tell you to trash your unspent ammo before you get to the airport. But here's a word of parting advice from your Phutatorius:
If you have any future plans to board a commercial airliner, you would do well to keep your feet on good old fashioned all-American asphalt in the meantime. And if you work for Chem-Lawn, you can forget it.
