Cincinnati
Sometimes you board a plane expecting to be taken home, and you get taken to Cincinnati instead.
Isn’t it weird, that they can do that? Take you somewhere else? Airlines don’t control the weather, but they should give you a cookie when they’re forced to detour. A clear, regular, consistent stream of information — and a cookie. And they should give you two if it’s Cincinnati.
We wait eight hours — I’ll spare you the details — and then rent a car. At last call, from National, bless them, the only corporation who hasn’t fucked Casey and me in 2026 and in fact has only delighted. And we take fellow castaway Jake with us. Casey and I have overheard his FaceTime calls with his wife and kid in the terminal, and decide he’s sufficiently non-murder-prone.
He’s on his way to Chicago to trade and ogle sports cards at a convention. I drive. We get McDonald’s, and he pays. Casey and I tell him we won’t accept any money for the ride, but when we get to the convention center hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, he puts a wad of cash in my hand anyway. More money than the airline will likely refund us. Made whole by a stranger.
When the bureaucracies that happen to own planes, and that occasionally fly them where they’re meant to go, with Band-Aided computers and near-tear employees — when they forget where we were headed in the first place, we get each other home.