you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

I really don't like airports, or airlines, and I think it's because I am not used to be powerless. You have to stand in lines, and deal with all sorts of stupid bureaucracy and inefficiencies and your time is completely in their hands, and you can't make a scene, because you might get kicked off the plane/arrested/shot. (I'm either an entitled Generation-Whatever brat, or a red-blooded American who doesn't hold with the Soviet-Style opacity because in America the customer is always right, damn it!)

I'm actually not talking about security. Going through Security is kind of a pain, and occasionly the TSA people are cranky old ladies and make your life more difficulty, but I can see the point, and, I can see why the time is being taken up: getting all those people through the scanner. What really annoys me is the way that planes get delayed, and more delayed, and then lose their runway slots, so get more delayed, and then, "oops, we forgot to take the jet-stream into account, so the flying time will actually be about an hour longer than we said." And then, THEN they have the nerve to tell you to "have a nice day and we hope you fly with us again."

And, of course, flying with a cello makes things so much more entertaining. I got the airport early. Fortunately, as it turns out, because at the check-in counter, although the gentleman who has helping me initially had no problem, the woman next to him exclaimed that she loves seeing instruments with tickets, because "see, it's so cute that its boarding pass says "Cello [Last Name]". Which brought another woman over, who announced that this was Not Okay. Cello cannot have boarding passes. It had to be changed into a single boarding pass for me with an extra card giving me an extra seat. Never mind that Cello and I have flown before, and it always has its own boarding pass, and this is NEVER a problem. Except at Little Provincial Airport, of course.

"If we let it go like this, then its in the computer that the cello is a person." There is no way to note that it is, in fact, not a person? Apparently, not. Now, in principle, although it is stupid to make a big deal about it, I wouldn't really care what form the boarding passes took, as long as I had one, and had proof that my cello got a seat. But no one could figure out how to make this change. At one point, someone was on two telephones at once, calling the airline's central HQ to try to get told how to do it. FORTY-FIVE minutes I had to wait.

After that, security was no big deal, and because the TSA woman was too busy yelling at the man in front of me to "take your coat out of that tray!" and "push your bag onto the belt, Sir!" I don't think she even noticed that I was putting a cello through. Or if she did, she didn't care.

They always make the cello sit in the bulkhead (I fly an open-seating airline), but the rest of the seats are usually taken by handicapped/elderly/very tall or large people, so I was sitting a few rows back. Which led to much confusion when there was a crew change at the stop-over, when the flight attendants asked for "Lydia", and I raised my hand, only to be told "not you, a different Lydia." Whom of course they didn't find, because, as I was later told, they were looking for the "person of size"** who had two seats, since, of course, they had no record of a cello, thanks to the stupidity of the check-in agent who took away its boarding pass.

At least we both got there, I suppose.

**I really hate this phrase. I understand that some euphemism is in order, but "person of size" is so obviously euphemistic that it has completely the opposite effect. Why not say "a large person"?