I'll just go ahead and change my name to Mr. Navorski

I have been at the Atlanta airport for 12 straight hours.  I was supposed to be on a flight last night at 9 PM to Reagan.  Well, to be fair, I was on the plane.  Starting at about 8:35.  First, it was going to be a 30 minute delay because we had to wait in line to get "de-iced".  Then it was an hour delay.  Then it was 11 and we were still waiting.  Then all the runways closed, and apparently there's a window after you get de-iced in which you can still take off, so we had to wait until a runway was open before we could even go get in line.  So we waited.  At around 12, we backed off the gate and got in line.  And waited some more.  At 2 AM we finally got de-iced and at 2:30 AM, the pilot came on and announced that we had waited so long that we were now low on fuel, so we had to return to the gate.  At that point, the freezing rain started coming down.  So off the plane we got and I have been here since.


Ways to entertain yourself in an airport:

• Talk to the people around you.  I have met a woman who works for Lockheed Martin who can't discuss the details of her job, a man in an army uniform who is leaving for Afghanistan in two weeks and said he thinks having children and being in the military is irresponsible, two hipster 18-yr-olds who are starting a band called Dove Dawn ("It's ironic", they explained, but I don't think they know what that means) and a very nice man at Atlanta Bread Company who keeps giving me free tea refills.
• Walk through the various terminals and see how the people change with the airlines.  For example, Air Tran was filled with huge families and 20-somethings with no money (like me!), while Delta was predominately older couples and business travelers.  My Freakonomics-style analysis of this is that Delta was much more popular about 15-ish years ago (I remember my grandparents used to use them a lot), so the people who have frequent flier miles with them are likely to be older.  Someone out there will shoot that down, I'm sure.
• Watch Netflix Instant Play on your laptop.  I've watched so many episodes of Friday Night Lights.  And the $10 it cost to connect to the internet is quite possibly the best investment I've made in the last year.

Note: Unfortunately, none of these things will actually cure the mind-numbing boredom that comes with being in the exact same space for this long.  Which brings me to my thought for the day.

There was a family near me at one of my hours at the airport with 2 kids, ages 3-ish and 8-ish.  The older one must have said "I'm bo-o-o-o-ored" about 65 times over the hour, stretching vowels and adding syllables in a way I haven't heard since teaching days.  The younger one, on the other hand, had 4 crayons and a napkin, and didn't make a peep.  He coloured away, making scenes of his family in various locations.  But no, this was not a trite revelation about how it all comes down to attitude, even though it does.

Rather, it mostly made me think about how much adults reward the wrong things.  I mean, like I said, the 3 year old was totally content, but his parents were barely paying him any attention.  The 8 year old, on the other hand, was being offered option after option to appease his increasingly loud feelings of discontent.  That 3 year old is going to learn that if he wants to compete, he better start finding something to complain about, and fast.  And that is how you end up with a plane full of people yelling at flight attendants, even though we ALL KNOW it is not their fault and there is nothing they can do.  The quiet, polite kids get 4 crayons and a napkin.  Whine, and a free chocolate milk is in your future.

EDIT: As of now, I am at a hotel in Atlanta.  The airport was basically completely shut down, and I'm hoping to be on a flight tomorrow morning at 8:55.  Here's hoping.