The Wrong Plane

One must imagine airport employees happy.

I for one, if subjected to an unappealing amalgam of bare feet and overweight bags and sleep deprived humans in their meanest states (in both senses of the word), would merely walk into the sea, never to be seen again. Perhaps I’d befriend a crustacean. Study Mer-law. Outdo my ex-merfriend at the big trial, and celebrate my victory with Jennifer Coolidge.

But I digress.

I say all this to say that I fully understand why, one early morning in 2008, an airline employee allowed me to board and ride on a completely wrong plane.

The wrong plane? What? How can that even happen. You’re lying.

I’m not. That was a mean thing to say.

Let’s go back a bit.

If you were born after 2001, the first thing you need to know is that airports used to be Different. For most of their history, they were treated much like train stations; you’d kiss your housewife/househusband/housespouse goodbye steps away from your gate, shoebox of fried chicken and potato salad tucked under your oldtimey arm, the hopeful winds of Reaganomics* lifting your plane into a sepia-colored sky. In other words, security was p lax. Even after 9/11, not everything changed all at once into the haphazardly strict protocols we’re accustomed to today.

Enter Kyra, Age 21. Dead asleep in a chair outside the regional gates of the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, boarding pass tucked neatly into her pocket (or maybe dangling from my idiot fingers, who knows). A natural night owl and procrastinator, I’d left my packing for my 6:30am flight out of Memphis to about 1 or 2am that morning. “I’ll sleep on the plane,” I had declared. “I’ll sleep on the plane” is a phrase of the optimist: one who looks at past airborne respites and willfully disregards their complete and total inadequacy. Not once in my life has a sit-nap at 20,000 feet left me feeling anything other than zombie-like^. However, I was going to visit friends in Greenville, South Carolina - a purely recreational trip, with no real need to arrive well-rested, so no harm, no foul, right?

I’d like to take a moment of appreciation for the Charlotte Douglas International Airport. Of all the hubs in America that I’ve traveled through, this one is one of my favorites. My mom, younger brother and I would often change planes there on our way to visit my grandmother and great aunt in the D.C. area. If we had time we would sit in the rocking chairs they have alongside some of the walkways.

How i would look at the airport if I didn’t have a huge horn case

with me at all times and practiced good sleep hygiene

I defy you to sit in a rocking chair and not automatically relax at least just a little bit (although I do have a story about sitting in Lorin Maazel’s rocking chair once at his home as he told me the history of rocking chairs, and I was decidedly *not* relaxed, but that’s a story for a future post).

The puddle jumpers that carry people to the regional airports in North and South Carolina gather in their own little area in the airport, with several gates clustered together. I made my trek the however many miles across the airport from the gate I landed in from Memphis, laid one bleary eye on the gate to Greenville, slumped into a nearby chair and promptly fell back asleep.

“Zone two, now boarding,” intones a friendly voice over the loudspeaker some time later, stirring me awake.

“I’m zone two,” my internal dialogue says, its speech somehow slurred. fun fact: Moderate to severe sleep deprivation impairs you at the same level as being drunk does.

Remember when I mentioned the slow transition of technology in airports post-9/11? This also included digital scanners at the gates. I got to the front of the line and a woman in an official airline uniform took my boarding pass, ripped it, and gave me the stub like it was 1996 and I was on my way to the Summer Olympics in Atlanta wearing a neon-colored jogging suit. But it was not 1996, it was 2008, my attire probably involved some form of Old Navy Cardigan, and, as I was to later learn, it was this woman’s first day on the job.

The perfect storm complete, I boarded my plane (or, more accurately, *a* plane), poured myself into my (a) seat, and before the plane was even fully boarded I was once again sound asleep.

I bumped awake what seemed like minutes later upon the plane’s landing.

“Welcome to Columbia, South Carolina,” said a flight attendant over the loudspeaker.

Now I was not, nor am I now, anything resembling a geographic scholar. Maybe Greenville and Columbia are very close together. Maybe they share an airport. Maybe they call the airport by different names depending on who you’re talking to. These were all possibilities my still-waking brain slowly considered as I quietly gathered my things and deplaned. The flight number listed at baggage claim drove the truth home for me: I was in the wrong f*cking city.

historical reenactment

It was a bright summer day in Columbia, South Carolina, which, as I learned while writing this post, resides approximately 104 miles southeast of Greenville, where my friends were waiting to pick me up.

I meekly approached the ticket counter and told them who I was. Before I could explain my ridiculous situation, they spared me the energy: “Oh, there you are.”

While my (the) plane was in the air, they must have gone through the boarding passes and found mine, and alerted Columbia that there was a Loose Kyra on her way there.

My phone rang as I waited for them to rebook me back to Charlotte. It was my friend Melissa. “Hey, Kyra, I’m pulling up soon, are you at baggage claim?”

“No…um… I’m in Columbia.”

“What??”

Yeah same, girl.

We arranged for me to get picked up in Greenville later in the day, and I got my new flights from the kind folks at the Columbia ticket counter†. As my third plane of the day taxied on the runway in Charlotte a couple hours later, an announcement on the loudspeaker: “Passenger Sims, please see the gate attendant after deplaning.”

Uh oh. Am I in trouble? Are they going to send me to Plane Jail? Has my unintentional criminal mischief landed me in the Mile High Correctional Center? Or worse: Are they mad at me?

Greeting me outside of the gate was a tall, crisply uniformed airline official, mirthlessly working at the gate computer. Standing next to him, draped in contrition, was my old friend, the new airline employee. Expecting to be read the Riot Act by the airline for being so careless, I was in no way prepared for her sincere apologies, or for when the stern airline official rewarded my misspent hours not with a lecture, but with a free roundtrip ticket to anywhere in the continental United States.

A bit dazed by this unearned fortune, I pocketed my (yes, also paper) voucher and made my way to my fourth and final flight of the day, and to a gaggle of good friends in Greenville, who (rightly) gave me so much shit for my whole entire visit.

What is there to be gleaned from this comedy of errors? One thing I can tell you for certain is that I learned nothing from this experience. 17 years later, I still Uber to early morning flights with hastily packed bags and nary a wink of sleep to my name. I didn’t even learn anything about myself, because it wasn’t even my first travel misadventure in that 12-month span, and this one didn’t even involve riding in a stranger’s car through Europe (more on that in a future post). The most significant thing about this story is that I don’t think anything like this could ever happen in our modern age of digital boarding passes and scanners. Whenever I bring up this story to anyone under 35, I feel like someone’s grandmother describing how they got to school before the automobile.

Actual footage of me telling my little airplane story.

Back in my day, it was easier to make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes took you on adventures. Back in my day, we were free.

*throws dentures* Now bring me my soup.

…

Antarctica update: Yesterday I ordered a Shewee. Also, I’m less than $1k away from my stretch goal of offering a free concert in NYC and livestream next year!

*to be clear: F— Ronald Reagan.

^Unfortunately, I have learned nothing from these sleep mistakes, and I never will.

†What do you think they’re doing right now? I hope they’re doing well.