In the heat of the moment, a lot of us tend to make a bigger deal out of some situations than we should. And by that, I mean basically everyone makes a bigger deal out of basically everything that they deal with. It’s absurd how into ourselves we are today. The shit we need to put on Facebook to get people to give us some likes. And snapchat and Instagram and Twitter and MySpace (do people still use Myspace?). We take pictures of ourselves doing things, or then doing nothing but sitting in front of a mirror looking at ourselves and making that stupid duck face. We post videos of us doing dumb things, intermixed with other people we’ve never met also doing dumb things. Right now, you’re reading the inner ramblings of another person who’s literally writing this because he wants to. And thank you for that by the way, but it furthers this particular point. Everything is not as crucial as we probably build it up into our own mind.
Why do we put things on this level? Is it that we just want to believe that we are that important? Are we all just becoming narcissists that have to be constantly paid attention to, that have to chronicle our every move and thought to play to the masses like our own individual Truman show?
Yeah, pretty much.
It’s not so bad sometimes, either. It means we never have to feel out of touch with anyone that we care about (or don’t care about, for that matter). We can constantly be entertained, by just surfing the annals of social media until we find something that one of our acquaintances did, said, or reposted that piques our interest. It’s cheaper than cable and stranger than fiction. There’s always something weird that you can find out there if you look hard enough, and that makes it easier to always find the thing that you want to see or hear next. Which, in turn, gets you used to seeing and hearing what you want to see and hear, so you may grow dependent on just that. Not just the fact that you can literally seek out stuff that justifies the things that you already thought. I mean the concept that you are just that important, where stuff should be readily and constantly available to you, no matter what or when or where or how.
And look, I know I’m not exempt from this. It’s one of the burdens of technology. We start living our lives faster and we stop remembering how to do stuff. I always think of phones. We used to have to remember people’s phone numbers. Now, the only numbers I really remember are from my childhood because that’s when I had to know who to dial and I dialed so often. I used to be so excited to get home from school or from classes at college to go and play computer games. Now I play games constantly and think nothing about it. Remember when you used to have to carry around CD’s that you wanted to hear? Or tapes? Or you had to know how play music yourself?! Now you just plug in your earbuds, or you just say screw it and press play anyway. Let everyone in the room jam out with you, who cares? It’s all right there at your fingertips. You don’t have to wait. So why not get used to that?
This takes me back to my college days for a few reasons. The mid 2000’s is when social media really started to take off as a ubiquitous part of everyone’s life. It was when Facebook and Twitter really started to come alive, and when YouTube went from a site that you visit to a thing that you did. We use YouTube as a verb now, but it used to be right there with a few other ways to search for something, like Ebaum’s world. Remember Ebaum’s world? Me too. Kind of.
Anyway, between technology becoming cheaper and wifi becoming a more thing that every place had or should have, it was actually a good time to be a college student. I was probably in my third year of undergrad at UW-Madison. And I’m fairly certain I was flying home from Thanksgiving in Texas back up to Madison, which means like many other times, I had to go through Chicago O’Hare airport. I hate O’Hare airport. For the simple fact that O’Hare makes everything more complicated. I’ve flown through this airport as a connection and which 2 exceptions, every god damn time I go there I get delayed. Doesn’t matter what time of day, where I’m going, or what season and weather, it never seems to fail that I do not get where I’m trying to go on time. I actually get surprised the times that I get out of O’Hare and my plans have not been ruined.
I’ve had times where I was running through the terminal like one of the Home Alone movies. Missed my flight every time. I’ve had times where the weather had them cancel my flights and the airline bought me a bus ticket instead. On the way back from my recruiting visit to UW, I got stuck in the airport for 13 hours going through 5 different flights on the standby list. But the time that sticks out in my mind the most about the perils of O’Hare airport is the time that I almost got into it with this old Asian lady about a power outlet.
So on this particular evening in Chicago, I was still waiting for my next flight that I could jump onto for a standby. Because I was late getting in from Dallas and my flight left without me. Like I expected. I called it from so far in advance, I didn’t even bother doing my homework because I knew I’d have time in the airport. So that’s what I did. I had some history research and I had to give my analysis of a historic speech, and it was actually not that hard but it was going to take a long time so I had to make sure that I could sit in a spot and focus a good amount of time all at once to at least knock out one of these assignments. So I get of the plane and I walk to terminal I will eventually be flying out of, and I look for a peaceful place to get my work done. No such luck. My flight was not the only one that was late getting in, there was a shitload of people waiting for standby seats all over the place. The announcing speakers were constantly talking over each other about which passenger’s were up next and which gates were now switching and what times departures were now being pushed back. The weather was not even that bad overall, but it was crappy other places and the terminal was jam packed with people.
So the hallways with outlets and desks on carpeted floors that were usually quieter and not as heavy with foot traffic? Gridlocked, not just with occupants, but with people hovering, waiting for someone to leave so that they could claim the next spot. So were the food courts, so were the chairs outside of most of the gates, it was absurd. It was like we were all waiting for concert tickets, but no one knew where the office was going to open up. I had been walking for twenty minutes, trying to find anywhere that I could just set up shop and get to work, and I finally found a spot on the tile floor around the corner from my eventual gate. It was going to be a few hours, so I used my jacket as a pseudo cushion and set my laptop and notes up.
After a few minutes, this other guy came by and asked if he could use the other side of the outlet, which I obviously said he could. He was a nice enough guy, about my age, from New Jersey. And he’s got his stuff he’s trying to get done, and I’m working on my stuff, and everything is good. And that’s the end of the story, right?
I’m afraid not.
Ten minutes into me and Jersey Boy working on our stuff without interruption (I knew his name at one point, but I forgot it and it doesn’t matter), an elderly looking Asian woman walks up to me slowly. She has this long, purple jacket on, and she has a cute but unsure kind of smile, and she’s holding a laptop. I’m not even sure she is coming up to me until she taps me on the shoulder. I had my earbuds in, so I remove them to hear her out.
“Um, excuse me?” She managed somehow. “Can you spare the power to share?” Don’t ask me how I remember that particular phrase, I just remember that’s what she said. And it sounded like this might be the extent of the English that she knows. I try to explain that I need the power and that I’m working on something and that she has to find another outlet in this case. I glance over at the other guy, who’s just staring back at her, probably hoping he doesn’t have to give a similar justification. She doesn’t look at him, she stares at me, like eventually I’ll change my mind. And when I say she stared at me, I mean like two straight minutes, just staring with this uneasy grin. Almost like she was processing what I must have said. And then all at once, it turns to disgust. Like I flipped a switch in her somehow. And yes, it might have been when I got sick of staring back at her uncomfortably and put my earbuds back in. But come on, two minutes is a lot of time to stare at someone 3 feet away and have them obviously waiting for you to give in to their demands.
She walks away, and I look over at the NJ guy again, and we exchange this look like, “What was I supposed to do?” But I look back over at her as she’s walking off in a huff, and I notice that on her screen is a still shot of a movie. I don’t know for sure, but I feel like it was actually a scene from ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. And that almost pissed me off for a second. The nerve of this asshole, trying to get me off of my outlet that I had to scavenge for so she can watch one of the many medical dramas out there. I may have moved over for Scrubs, mind you, but not for Meredith Grey. I have my principles.
Anyway, we go back to our work. And that lasts about 5 minutes. And I’m just now getting into the groove of the work I’m doing, like it’s just getting productive, and I get this feeling that I’m being watched. I can’t explain why, but I just get this weird inkling. But I try to shake it off as I continue my speech analysis. But then I get the feeling again, and for some reason, I look up, and I see the Asian lady in the Purple coat walking slowly with another Asian lady, and they’re both glaring at me as they pass by. They are locking eyes with me as they move down the corridor towards the mini bookstore. I was a bit taken back by it, because I had almost forgotten that she existed, and now she’s back, and she has backup. But again, no big deal.
And then a few minutes later, I look up and she’s walking back across the walkway in front of us the other way, and there’s another lady, this one REALLY old with them. This woman had a cane, but she was more intent on locking eyes with me than on making sure that she was walking carefully enough to protect her one good hip. And then they all got smoothies, and came back and just kind of camped out right across from us. All giving stink eyes right at me as they sipped their Orange Julius’s through straws.
Now of course the Jersey guy noticed this too, and he looked over and said something to the affect of, “Dude, did you do something to piss off the Asian mafia?” And I said that I wasn’t sure anymore, and I told him that I’m pretty sure that the first lady was watching Grey’s Anatomy, and he laughed at that. “You and I might get our asses whipped over Ellen Pompeo?” And I say, “Yeah, this might get ugly.” So he says he’ll back me up if it really comes to a head or anything, which he hopes it won’t because this would be a really stupid thing to fight anyone over, under any circumstance. I tell him that I agree, and that we will hopefully be able to reason with them if they really can’t let this outlet thing go. And we stare back over at them for another minute or two.
And then we hear, “All passengers for flight 3477 to San Francisco can now begin boarding now. We are now boarding all rows, all passengers.” And one of the ladies whispers something to the main Asian lady in the purple, and they all just kind of snap out of it, and they hop up and leave. And that was the end of it.
I mean, this would have gone down as one of the dumbest things to fight about, period. A power outlet in a crowded airport full of outlets if you look hard enough. At least I assume that’s what happened. I may have disrespected her and not realized it somehow, or she may have not liked black people, it is possible. Maybe she was just overcome by the power of this particular episode and really needed to know what happened next. But all of these come back to the point that whatever she desired at that moment was obviously very important to her, as was it important to me to get my own stuff done rather than just get out of the way to not provoke someone who clearly needed to finish binge watching a season on a laptop. This was such a stupid thing that was a huge deal at the time, apparently. Seriously, who even gives a shit in retrospect?
Furthermore, why do we complain about traveling through airports? What happens after we wait for a while? Oh that’s right, we get into metal contraptions and fly through the sky! And it’s way faster and it’s really not that much more of a hassle than driving or taking a bus would be, and many times it’s less of an overhaul hassle, and we still complain constantly. Louis CK pointed this out too. “New York La Guardia to LAX in 6 hours. That used to take 30 years! And a bunch of you would die along the way, and people would put your hat on a stick where they buried you and keep walking. You’d be a whole different group of people by the time you got to California! Now you watch an Adam Sandler movie, take a big runny dump, and you’re there.” It wasn’t a 30 year trip, but otherwise, yeah, I have to agree. We’ve gotten used to complaining. And we’re probably not stopping any time soon.
I’m still probably never going to San Francisco again, when I think about it. I don’t need to run into that woman, especially if she doesn’t like how Grey’s Anatomy has turned out these past few years. Except she may not have actually been from San Francisco… Maybe I’ll avoid California for a while.
You know what? Screw her. I’ll go where I want. I hope I see her next time I go through O’Hare. Bring it on. I can handle the stink eye from old Asian ladies. I hope she has her whole family with her next time. Seriously, screw her.
And screw Grey’s Anatomy. Just because.
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