It's absolutely amazing what you hear when the weather halts airline flights. I'm sitting alongside the status boards at Fort Lauderdale airport, awaiting my flight to Providence. The flight is already three hours late, but a command performance moments ago by a Southwest gate attendant put everything in perspective for me. Too bad the irate flyers didn't hear it.
She gets on the gate microphone and says, "Well folks, I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?"
Thereupon in gate-land a collective grown arose, audible throughout the packed hallway. After the groan, the gate attendant said, "Here's the bad news: In addition to the weather delay, the plane at the gate is broken. So we won't be taking off for a long while."
The groan grew to a growl. From the crowd, the question is fired like a bullet: "What's the good news?!"
To which she responds, brightly, "The good news is, we're on the ground."
And that, my dear friends, has put this entire delay in perfect perspective for me.
Still, I have to wonder: Why is it that we can put a man on the moon, we can fly unmanned drones from thousands of miles away, and we can't fly in bad weather?
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