It’s after midnight. The plane spits us out at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth Airport and we trot across the empty building. We stand before baggage claim with a bunch of weary passengers, staring at the large Roulette Wheel of Luggage with tired looks on our faces.
But the baggage treadmill hasn’t started moving yet. We are gathered around it, waiting, but it’s been thirty minutes.
There is a man next to me who is wearing a business suit that looks like it cost more than a three-bedroom-two-bath in Mountain Brook, and he is clearly ticked off.
“$%*#!” he says.
Over and over again.
He looks like the kind of guy who, whenever he doesn’t get what he wants, always asks to speak to the manager. You know the kind I’m talking about. You can’t take these people anywhere.
“$%*#!” he says again.
I’ll bet this guy was no day at the beach when he was a kid, either. I’ll bet when his childhood friends were busy playing cowboys and Indians, he was dressing up as Ted Turner and firing the butler.
My friend Darren used to be like that. Before he would come over to play, we all had to participate in group meditation just to prepare for him. Because we knew how things would go:
We would all want to play Lone Ranger, but Darren would want to play “accounting firm,” which was a make-believe game wherein we would pretend to be H&R Block professionals doing tax returns in cubicles. Darren would play the role of boss, patrolling the cubicles and shouting, “Come on people! Time is money! Chop! Chop!”
And eventually we’d tie Darren to a tree and scalp him.
So this guy is a lot like Darren. He’s pacing around, getting angrier by the second. He removes his watch and shakes it.
“$%*#!” he says again.
He sits on a chair and starts making loud sighs. People are looking at…