Northwest, Southeast, Orlando Part 4
As soon as I trammed my way to the gate areas I started looking for food. I hadn’t eaten much breakfast and I knew there wasn’t going to be a meal on the flight. Ah, for the good old days when they brought you a sandwich in cellophane, coffee and peanuts.
Now if you want anything in your stomach you buy some trail mix.
I found a fast food restaurant. The emphasis is on “a”. In the whole Orlando airport gate area — the place where people from around the world come to get on their planes and fly back to their homes around the world — there is one restaurant.
After some confusion I found the end of the line, which was about an eighth of a mile from the counter.
I had three hours before my flight. I could have stood in an eighth of a mile line and bought a decent fast food hot sandwich for $5. I didn’t do it because I hate standing in long lines. It is not a trait I’m proud of.
I just don’t like lines. Lines make me feel like I’m in a hurry. They make me feel like I should be at the head of the line. I don’t like the slow nature of lines. I don’t like the feeling of helplessness.
So I left.
I found a little stand in an empty gate that sold packaged sandwiches and I paid $7 for a chicken salad sandwich in a vacuum-packed chunk of plastic. I sat down on a seat in the empty gate and watched CNN while I ripped open the wrapper.
I felt like one of those helpless guys in an old Twilight Zone show, sitting by myself in a huge abandoned airline gate watching the same CNN News I’d seen this morning, eating a sandwich.
I don’t know why, but I looked at the printing on the back of the wrapper, you know, calories, fat and all the other information left-wing do-gooders forced upon food manufacturers for good reason but to no avail.
This sandwich had been made the day before I was eating it.
This sandwich was made of processed chicken, which doesn’t have a good reputation to begin with. It had mayonnaise. It was white bread. I was eating poison!
I ate slowly, washing it down with water with the same feelings that Socrates probably felt as he sipped his Hemlock.
You are going to die!
I envisioned myself keeling over in front of hundreds of people at my Northwest gate and having diarrhea, or worse, being 5,000 feet in the air with the pilot telling us in his pleasant southern accent that the skies are clear with just the slightest breeze and all is well while Dennis Miller in seat 34-A is retching with a fever of 104 and dying from eating a day old pre-packaged chicken sandwich that he paid $7 for when all he had to do was stand in line for an eighth of a mile and buy a nice hot fast food sandwich that’s so generic an alien could eat it with no stomach problems.
Damn me! I’m a nationally recognized expert in my field who has given a presentation on podcasting in Orlando. I just paid $60 ($50 with a $10 tip) for a town car. And then I blow it all by eating a day old chicken salad sandwich because I won’t stand in line for decent fast food with all the germs, nutrients and vitamins zapped out.
I monitored my stomach for the next two hours. How many grumbles? How much growling? Diarrhea?
None of the above.
I made it. I lived.
Looking back I could have made more out of the experience. I could have spread out my napkin, eaten my sandwich and enjoyed the third rerun of news on CNN in the empty gate, and just not worried about anything.
But then, hindsight is everything.