The cruel, stepwise execution of American Airlines flight 1316, in screenshots
Shipping an animated bag of tainted, talking meat around the country is a dumb idea anyway
On Thursday, two years will have elapsed since the irregularly shaped baggage labeled with my unique biomarkers was last found on an airplane. On November 4, 2019, that baggage, which talks and types and refuses to sit still and simply die, was shipped from Logan Airport in Boston to Denver International Airport. In the spring of last year, having attained an optimistic scent rare in its own adult-stage experience, it was in the process of arranging a temporary shipping of itself to Europe, which it has yet to stain and conversely; that whole program fell victim to a bevy of unsolvable c. 2020 bugs, and my decomposing yet energetic meat has remained earthbound since.
Yesterday morning, my meat was to be transported from Denver to Manchester, New Hampshire in two steps by air cargo. From Manchester, it was to be moved northward some 25 miles in a rented automobile. To facilitate this, it was to be packed onto a dedicated airport bus in Boulder, Colorado roughly three hours in advance of the scheduled flight.
My meat’s only luggage was an efficiently loaded backpack, and it was also equipped with a phone boasting an electronic boarding pass. Therefore, it was safe to anticipate my meat following a mostly unbroken path from the Denver Airport entrance through the security checkpoint and to the departure gate.
The original departure time was 11:49 a.m. MDT. But at 7:58 a.m., as my meat was being prepared for transportation to the bus terminal, it received this e-mail:
This was not a big deal, since the flight from Charlotte to Manchester wasn’t scheduled to depart CLT until 8:05 p.m. It also gave my meat an hour to be given a walk at home; it could then just take the 9:52 a.m. airport-bound bus instead of the 8:52 a.m. one.
Then, at 8:50 a.m., in came another e-mail:
This would still leave my meat 90 minutes to find the right gate in Charlotte. CLT is a sizable airport, but my limb-meat can still cover ground apace even in its cloying condition and even when saddled with a 5-kilogram pack. My thinking meat, however, was aware that the weather in Denver was not inclement, and had become concerned about the source of these multiple delays.
At 9:13 a.m., that thinking meat—en route to the bus terminal now—was given another jolt:
My lipid-rich processing flesh was beginning to accept that my meat never should have paid money to participate in any sort of commercial relocation process, and that the day was likely to end with my meat decaying and moldering away in the same spot it had the previous night.
My meat—a mask now strapped across its primary noise- and stank-emitting pore—began occupying a seat on the bus at around 9:45 a.m. Unbeknownst to the portion of that meat tasked with information processing—which, like yours, is in a box with too many vents sitting dumbly and awkwardly on a rotating stem—American Airlines had been canceling flights seemingly at random throughout the weekend, hundreds of them. This all allegedly started because of a storm somewhere, or a butterfly flapping its asshole somewhere else, with said disturbance leading to weather-related delays causing chaos for travelers in a merry, cascading fashion. Evidently, no one wants to work for American Airlines anymore.
It was a good thing my thinking meat was compelled to keep checking e-mail, because at 9:50 a.m., this came in:
My meat was rolled off the bus mere moments before it departed for a destination suddenly rendered useless—this was clearly my meat’s lucky day!—and was loosely adhering to a suddenly useless bus ticket. My thinking meat wanted to detach the bus ticket from my prehensile meat and donate it to someone else, but there was no one waiting to give it to. With no one watching or caring, that ticket expired at 2:59 a.m. today.
American Airlines, like members of all oligopolies, is a dismally run business. But that doesn’t mean it lacks a sense of humor. At 10:13 a.m., it rescheduled my meat for a flight that had, at least in theory, left Denver almost four hours earlier:
When my meat was back in its usual storage locker, it rescheduled a flight for Thursday morning—two years to the day since its last flight—and dealt with the process of changing the rental-car details. But it has no confidence that it is actually going to New Hampshire this week.