Shit Happens

Post-travel airport experience/human behavior observations:

First, thank you @jetblue for (mostly) allowing fee-free flight changes. I hated when airlines started charging for reasonable changes (e.g., hopping onto an earlier flight that isn’t full).

Second, it would be great if protocols were standard across airports. This week, I arrived early enough at BOS + DCA to try to jump to earlier flights. When I got to the gate at @flylogan they told me I had to do this at the customer service desk. So when I got to @reagan_airport on the return, I went to customer service first and waited in line, then was told to go to the gate to make the switch.

As a result, I was rushing to get to the gate. Which leads me thing #3. I know there are WAY bigger fish to fry at security, but I am about 99.9% sure that my jacket got caught in the conveyor belt and wrecked at DCA. Since I was rushing I just grabbed my stuff from the belt and sprinted to the gate. When I shook out my jacket to put it back on I was like OMG WTF is this what my jacket looked like through my entire day of meetings?!?! 😳

I mentioned this to @jenvento1 and she said she didn’t notice my jacket looking fucked up. And then it occurred to me that I would have noticed this damage when I packed on Monday morning since the jacket was folded in half and rolled along with the rest of my outfit. I also imagine I would have noticed the damage when I unrolled everything and hung it up in my hotel.

It’s a bummer the jacket is wrecked because I love the color and style, but big picture, it’s fine. It’s just an object and I have gotten plenty of enjoyment out of it! The bigger thing that bums me out is that no one said anything to me at security. Assuming that the only way my jacket could get this wrecked was by getting stuck in the conveyor belt (I wonder if they needed to run it again on its own because I had tucked it in the bin…it was not hanging out), someone would have needed to retrieve it. And then they just put it back with all of my stuff. That kind of sucks.

Shit happens. I just think people should own it.