Lo-fi Adventures at the Airport

You’re at the airport, your flight is delayed for six more hours, and none of your electronic devices is working. How do you pass the time?

 

     They said the flight would be delayed at six hours.  I take a look at my clam shell phone and notice that…alas…it has turned off.  I left the charger in my luggage.  “Oh well”, I thought…”I’ll figure something out.”  What to do?  What to do?  I wander the long row of departure areas watching the folks on the tarmac work.  I feel like I’m watching ants.  All those little tasks just to ensure we people and our things get somewhere in safety.  There goes the first ten minutes….I then wander to the nearest news stand.  I figure, I can stand around awkwardly in a Barnes and Noble for an hour or two just glancing at the different books, so I think I can do this.  Ten minutes of staring at tabloids and “I love (insert generic city name here)”.  So many senseless things on those covers.  So many things to find unimportant.  Can’t live vicariously through the rich and famous.  It sounds exhausting.  The experience has left me anxious to find something else to do.  20 minutes feels like a life time.  And I’ve still got over five hours to kill.  So, I get the most interesting paper back I see.  The one with the most interesting cover.  It’ll have a clock or a gavel on it.  This is where they exclusively sell John Grisham novels, right?  That’s what my mother had led me to believe when I was about 10.  I sit down in the waiting area and attempt to start reading.  Leafing through the pages, I find that I’m not quite ready to sit here just yet.  Here is where the waiting will feel the longest.  I repeat this process several times while occasionally people watching.  That’s the most fun thing to do when there’s nothing else to do.  Watching folks pass by….Where are they going?  Are they in a hurry?  Was their flight delayed?  What will they do when they get there?  And I can come up with as many possibilities as my heart desires.  Eventually I look around and find out…Six hours has passed…and I can be on my way.