Day 0
The tension here is palpable.
My immediate fate is in the hands of a bleached blonde woman, her features growing stark and haggard in the blue-white glare of a computer screen at Gate 39, Terminal 2, Lindbergh Field Airport in San Diego.
One and a half hours ago, I sauntered up to the near-empty gate and unshouldered my pack onto a seat by the desk.
Clearly, getting a standby seat on this jet should be no problem. The whole place is empty. And anyway, who in their right mind wants to go to Atlanta at 10:40pm on a Wednesday night? The blonde's attitude exuded cheerful confidence, and I brushed aside any lingering, anemic traces of standby travel anxiety. This time tomorrow, I'd be snacking on soup dumplings in Shanghai, leafing through train timetables to plan the next leg of my trip.
Over the next hour or so, my confidence steadily erodes under an onslaught of ticket holders marching up to the counter. Upgrade requests are turned away, apologetically; the first-class cabin is full. Seat changes are set aside provisionally; the flight's bookings look like they're pretty tight.
Now, brushing stray peroxide strands from her face, this Fate who has effortlessly metamorphosed over the last hour from Clotho to Atropos, clips off that last thin, shining thread of hope as she picks up the intercom.
"Attention passengers traveling to Atlanta on Delta Flight 1048, we are in fact slightly oversold" -- this last word spoken with a slight lilt, as if it were a slightly worn inside joke among all of us old friends -- "and we'd like to ask any volunteers to come forward to give up their seats in exchange for a hotel tonight, and a voucher for future travel."
A death knell if ever there was one.
But still, I'm not quite ready to believe it; there she is, still standing there, and here: look at my bag, it's all packed. Look at me, I have all these slips of paper with times and destinations written on them. Eventually, I edge my way up to her brushed stainless altar, and sheepishly ask if there's any hope left for us sinners.
She asks my name as a matter of form, then offers up some words of comfort, clearly false, and obviously modulated by corporate policy to defuse customer anger: "Ohh, I'm afraid not. It looks like we didn't get any standby passengers on this flight at all."
It's a terrible shame for her efforts at commiseration that I saw her assign seats to four standby passengers a couple minutes ago. No big deal; if I was too low on the list, I was too low on the list. I don't need a shoulder at Delta to cry on, I just want to know what I need to do from here.
Anyway.
This kind of travel's new to me, and in retrospect I should have realized that the stability of my outward itinerary was much more significant than my return.
So now I'm left with the choice between trying to snag another standby to Atlanta over the next couple of days, cooling my heels there until Saturday when I stand a decent change of stepping onto a plane bound for Shanghai, or simply eating the cost of an outward bound ticket at retail, and begging my friend to get me on standby just for the trip home, instead.
The choice, essentially, is between a cost in risk and inconvenience -- if I can't get on the Saturday flight, my next chance to get to China will be Monday -- or one in currency. I know that, on a smaller scale, this will be a dilemma I face daily on this trip. I always imagined I would absorb these with aplomb; spending an unexpected day in some rural backwater while engineers scrape bits of exploded water buffalo off the front of our train, or tapping away a few days on my computer, waiting for the rains to slacken enough for me to venture into the hills.
In mid-stream like that, I'm certain I'll be vastly more willing to put up with the tribulations of the road rather than buying my way out. But I've been looking forward to this trip for so long, this first step proving to be a stumble has me reaching for my wallet already. I just want to get a move-on, already.
So far, my costs are only in time and dignity. I've canceled my hotel room in Shanghai for now, so I'm not paying rent on an empty room, but so far I've spent a half hour and several hairs' worth of melanin trying to persuade a nice girl at the Courtyard Shanghai named "Kitty" to talk to the concierge about holding the package I mailed to myself there.
Really, I am limited in very little but funds. I have a gap of about 3.5 months ahead of me, and I don't really have any dignity anyway, so it doesn't matter how I spend it.
I should let that inform my decisions, but I'm not certain if I'll take my own advice.