I’m sitting in a coffee shop in London-Heathrow listening in on the din around me. Another flight is cancelled, Obama is talking about airport security on the overhead television, and all the coffee chatter is about the deep freeze that has hit Europe, the connections that have been missed, and the warmer, sandier places people would rather be.
Obama switches back to Blitzer. There’s been another shooting in the United States. Disgruntled factory worker.
Then back to the main story of the last two weeks – the young Nigerian man who almost blew up an airplane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Turns out American intelligence knew about a potential Yemeni-Nigerian threat but a misspelling of Abdulmutallab punched into a database allowed him slip through.
I wonder how many times I’ve averted something potentially disastrous because I took extra care to spell someone’s name correctly
Outside the tarmac is covered in snow. It looks wet and miserable and all I want to do is stand out there in the slop and have a cigarette. Unfortunately I’m trapped in airport limbo; imprisoned in a shopping mall where everything is overpriced, babies cry incessantly, and everybody is eternally pissed off after being awake for 24 hours or more, crammed into flying metal tubes, and then made to take apart their belongings, take off their clothes, and explain why they are indeed just a weary traveler and not another Abdulmutallab with plastic explosives lining their underwear.
Just under five hours before I begin yet another transatlantic jump. I stare at the departures screen, at my ticket stub, and back at the screen. I hope my flight doesn’t get delayed.
I hope someone didn’t misspell my name and blacklist me as a potential terror threat. This trip home is going to be long enough as it is.
I hope it’s as cold and miserable in Canada as it is here so I can stand in it, feel my East African tan fade away, and get back to my old life.
I hope I never really get back to my old life.
I hope you’re enjoying yourself because it’s later than you think. You never know when a pair of explosive Fruit of the Loom’s might have your name on them.
