RANDOM THOUGHTS WHILE BEING STUCK ON AN AIRPLANE AND WHY DO BISCOFF COOKIES TASTE SO DARN GOOD
“Hopefully, we will be in line to take off not too terribly much longer.”
The words of the pilot echoed through the airplane’s speakers sounding both authoritative and feeble at the same time (not to mention grammatically awkward). At this point, we had already been sitting on the idling plane for over an hour and a half. Our prospects for taking off did not look good as major storms blanketed the area. While the Biscoff Cookie I ate was delicious, it was hardly enough to sustain me. I looked around the plane and realized that my fellow passengers and I were nothing more than prisoners in a minimum-security prison. While I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of the prison experience, I imagine that, like us, white collar criminals are relatively well treated, albeit begrudgingly, fed delicious cookies (although not likely as delicious as the Biscoff), and not allowed to leave.
I bide my time by reading and playing mindless games on my I-Pad. As I look around, I notice all the other passengers doing the same. What did people do before I-Pads and Smartphones? Were they forced to read books or worse, talk to each other? I wonder how many long-term friendships, business deals or even romances were started by people interacting on an airplane. I have been here now for almost two hours and the only human voice I heard was the defeated musings of the pilot bemoaning our delay and the never frequent enough sweet melody of the flight attendant offering me a cookie, which was, by the way, delicious. Can you get Biscoff Cookies anywhere besides on an airplane? They certainly are a special treat. Crisp but moist with a nice touch of cinnamon. If I could, I would have a big box of them in my house and then be able to eat them whenever I wanted. Maybe if I did that, I wouldn’t have to fly so much. Although, if you are flying just for the cookies, you probably need some therapy (and a life), no matter how delicious they are. And they are delicious.
“We will be returning to the gate”, said the pilot after another eternal period of silence. “Once we get there, I will update you on our departure status”. Ha, I say knowingly and smugly to myself, our departure status is that we will not be departing. Our status is that we have no status. Our status is that we should all start thinking about getting off this plane and leaving tomorrow. But when we finally arrived back at the gate, after almost an hour of maneuvering through the tarmac, the gate agent told everyone to stay in their seats. “We will be refueling and then getting back on the runway”, she said, “unless you want to re-book”. I looked around at my fellow travelers and to my surprise, they all seemed perfectly content to sit there, holding on to the slimmest of possibilities that we would actually get out today. I think they call this Stockholm Syndrome. It’s when prisoners fall in love with their captors, so much that they don’t escape when they have the chance. I must have a high level of resistance for this phenomenon, despite how tasty their cookies are, because all I could do was think about getting out. Also, I have seen this movie before, and I know how it ends. It ends with me trying to get home at midnight after they finally cancel the flight. There’s no way I was staying locked in this prison another three hours only to be told “sorry”, no matter how comfortable it was (and no matter how good the cookies were — and they were good). Besides, I had already done the New York Times Crossword puzzle, finished the book and I was reading and tried, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep. It was time to bust out of there. It was time to do my best Andy Dupree and tunnel my way to freedom. So as soon as the gate agent finished her spiel about staying in your seat because we were heading right back to the runway, I stood up, took my bag down from the overhead and made my way to the exit. The flight attendant was waiting for me holding my jacket along with a big smile. As I grabbed my coat, I felt like Mel Gibson in Braveheart: “They may take our money and our time, but they can’t take away our freedom!” Except no one followed me off.
Off the plane I rushed into the crematorium-like heat of the jet bridge. I finally emerge into the air-conditioned paradise that is Terminal C at LaGuardia Airport. I was free. I was off the plane. No longer held captive. Able to go anywhere I wanted, which at that moment was the bathroom; certainly not an air-conditioned paradise but much better than an airplane loo.
Several hours later, after a nice dinner at home, I found out that my flight had been cancelled and that all those people who remained on the plane while I escaped, trusting that eventually the skies would clear and they would be airborne, had to get off the plan and figure out where to spend the night. Their love for their captors having clouded their vision so severely that they ended up never making it out that day. While I feel good about my decisions to bail and empowered that I had the strength to resist the pull of the comfortable seat, I do regret one thing. Had I remained on the plane I may have had another Biscoff Cookie and they are delicious.
