Election Night at the Airport
This article was written in November 2024 and remained in my drafts until now.
I was scheduled to work a short 4.5-hour shift at the airport on Tuesday afternoon. The night before, a cold front passed through the state. It brought a line of severe thunderstorms that heavily disrupted air travel in the area. I didn’t think about that as I punched in for my shift.
Our airline usually has three inbound flights overnight. They remain overnight and turn around and fly back the next morning. One of the flights arrived before the thunderstorms hit, but the other two diverted to another airport over 150 miles away. Those two flights remained there overnight, and the crew timed out. The next morning, they couldn’t depart the diversion site due to gate congestion. The airport was full with their regularly scheduled flights, plus all of the diverted aircraft from the night before. The two flights scheduled to depart that morning were delayed nearly 12 hours, and they later departed in the evening.
In the evening, I was working one of those delayed flights at the gate. An older man approached me with a boarding pass for the other flight that had already departed. He was livid. He was sitting at the wrong gate and missed his flight. My co-workers made terminal-wide announcements and paged his name several times. I guess he fell asleep, or didn’t understand why nobody was at his gate, boarding his flight. Two hours after his scheduled departure, he approached me, demanding to know what happened to his flight and what my solution was for his problem.
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He asked me the reason for the delay, and I thought that information would help placate him. I tried to explain the whole story as I understood it — the storms, diversions, crew timing out, gate congestion at the diversion airport. However, he kept interrupting me, and wouldn’t let me get past the first part about the thunderstorms. I really did feel bad for him, and the disruption to his travel plans. Despite what many believe, gate agents actually do want you to get to where you’re going. We’re here for you. And we’ve been in your shoes, too.
But I felt myself becoming livid. Why isn’t this man listening to me? He asked me for an explanation, but does he not really care? As he vented his disappointment in the airline, I wanted to say, “I am sorry, I know you’re disappointed. I know you’re stressed and tired, but the airline does not control the weather. Let’s move past this now, since you won’t let me finish answering the question you asked, and let me help you get on your way.”
Then it hit me. The fact that this was the night of the presidential election was not lost on me. As millions of Americans went to the polls, angry over inflation and high grocery prices, most weren’t aware of the backstory or the intricate connections involved. In the past few years, a global pandemic happened, supply chains were disrupted, and companies raised prices because they could. However, based on the election results, it seemed that most people didn’t want to understand how we got here. Like the airport passenger, they just wanted to know whom to blame and who was going to help — and maybe who was going to give them a free hotel.
