Are We There Yet?

At the Airport.


Uncle Teddy pork barrelled (it's a verb, look it up) us a metric butt-ton of federal moola to turn the Anchorage International Airport in the Ted Stevens International Airport. And by metric butt-ton, I mean a shitload of money, even by Ted Stevens' porky standards.

But it's mostly smoke and mirrors. The Anchorage airport is like one of those Hollywood sets, all glitz in front, and nothing but a shell and 2x4's behind the scenes. The lobby is all marble and chrome, the baggage handling system is a guy named Wally who doubles as the janitor and Ted's pool boy and who is about 104 years old and unloads the planes one bag at a time and totes the luggage around front on a burro.

Four years ago the place underwent an umpity million dollar upgrade. And today they're ripping it all out and upgrading the upgrades. The place is a construction zone. It's been a construction zone for years and years and shows no sign of ever being done. Ted, still raking in the pork dollars, even though he's long gone. At least he is in the South Terminal, the one the tourists and oil executives use.

Over here in the North Terminal however - well, it's still 1970. Nothing works. The carpets are threadbare and the chairs are ass-sweat soaked vinyl. The status boards are updated with chalk, yes, chalk. There is a tired and dirty air about the place - pre-oil boom Alaska.


See, over here in the North Terminal is where we Alaskans usually fly in and out of. Ted doesn't have his name on anything over here, hell he's probably never even been in the North Terminal. From the looks of things this would be a perfect place for Ted's replacement, Mark Begich, to pour in a few pork dollars.

The plane is late. Hours late. Mechanical failure. They've replaced it with a larger plane, but it's still oversold. They're bribing people to get off the plane. $250 dollar vouchers. Yeah, kiss my ass on that. And really, how is this possible? Frankly, it concerns me when the people who run the airlines suck so bad at math that they can't even get the number of tickets correct - you know, there's shitload of math when it comes to flying the fucking thing. Maybe they should let the pilots sell the tickets.

The upside of the plane being late, of course, is that it's a couple less hours we have to spend in the George Bush International Prayer Emporium in Houston (Yes, Houston, not Dallas, my mistake, sorry).

We're off to a rocky start, but we've made it through security and the plane has finally arrived. Once they hose out the vomit and shoo the moose off the runway we'll be on our way.

Yay, vacation.

__________________________________
Update: Wow, I think that post set the record for misspellings and typos and cut and paste malfunctions. It's also the first post I made from the netbook, which at the time was done using IE7, because I hadn't finished customizing it yet (and in fact, I'm making this update from IE7. I'd forgotten that IE doesn't do spell checking (hey no redlines, no errors, right?), and the netbook screen is small and I can't see everything like I can in the office.