In mid-May, my weekly humor column
described an interesting adventure where I ended up sleeping in an airport
terminal. Although “sleeping” is not the most accurate word I could use to
describe the ordeal. A better word to use would be: “tossing and turning in
sheer agony on a rock-hard floor covered with a thin dirty carpet from midnight
to 4 a.m. while my sleep-deprived brain started hallucinating and nearby
industrial strength vacuum cleaners pounded rock concert-level decibels into my
ear drums.” (And come to think of it, “word” is not the most accurate word to
use to describe an ordeal that requires, at minimum, a 41-word, punctuation-free,
run-on sentence, the kind that compels high school English teachers to give no more
than a C-minus.)
If you didn’t catch the original
weekly column, you should look it up online, as it was the absolute best column
I ever wrote that week.
Anyway, I noticed an interesting
phenomenon regarding that particular adventure. Once I finally arrived home
after the airport experience, I told many people about it. And then, of course,
I wrote about the ordeal in my newspaper column, which means an additional six people
learned about it. Well, everybody I spoke with immediately replied with their own
tale of woe. It seems having to endure a sleepless night is a vivid and
memorable event in a person’s life. (And I’m a prime example, as this is the
second column about that night, and I’m sure I can milk this topic some more by
squeezing out a couple more columns.)
The stories people shared with me
about their sleeping nightmares fell into one of two different categories:
either a similar airport terminal ordeal or camping.
When telling people what happened to
me, I was surprised at how many folks wouldn’t even let me finish before they
launched into their own “stuck in an airport” saga. More than a few times I
found myself thinking, “Hey, I’m the one telling the story. I’m the one looking
for a little sympathy. This just happened to me two days ago. I don’t want to
hear about your Logan Airport incident from nine years ago.”
But virtually every time I told my
story, the other person would get really excited and exclaim, “Yeah, that
happened to me, too!”
These folks had some interesting
adventures, many involving crying babies and no more diapers, which makes my
airport ordeal seem rather tame by comparison, as I only had to deal with one
crying adult (me) and the men’s room was 20 feet away. It seems those of us who
have been forced to spend a night in an airport terminal have a special bond.
We’ve been through the same ordeal and can offer each other heartfelt empathy.
The other lack-of-sleep stories I
heard were about camping, stories such as: it started raining and the tent
leaked; I discovered ants in my sleeping bag; the air mattress deflated at 2
a.m.; I thought I heard a bear and couldn’t fall asleep. I’m sorry, people, but
camping stories received zero empathy from me. You weren’t forced to spend a
sleepless night in a terrible situation because of problems with the national air
transportation system. You put yourself in that situation on purpose!
So if you want to interrupt me to tell
of the time you were stranded in an airport for three days because of a
blizzard, I’m all ears. I feel your pain. But if you want to tell me how little
sleep you got on a camping trip, I don’t have time for it, because I have to
write another column about my night in the airport.
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