Passengers
It occurred to me shortly after this conversation that the passengers were my only hope, and while it occurs to me this should’ve been obvious from the start I’m not surprised that it wasn’t.
Anyway, my thinking goes like this: to your average stewardess this is just a mundane job, nothing too frightening or complicated, but the passengers, it’s their lives at stake, their money to be here, wouldn’t they demand some sort of competence from me just like everybody demands everything when it’s their life & money at stake? The passengers would stop me, they would demand that I be terminated, that some dependable robot or computer take over.
My plan couldn’t seem simpler, just turn on the PA and start talking, “If you look out over the left or right wing you’ll notice a huge chunk of ice the size of a Volkswagen, apparently it’s been there forever but I never had the presence of mind to notice, I think one of these dials or levers is supposed to alert me to these sorts of things but I don’t understand stuff like that and I’m convinced that half of this crap is broken or malfunctioning anyway.”
That last thought held me for a second. Shit! It was because I’d forgotten to turn on the PA. Doubleshit! I had no idea how to turn on the PA, every time I touched the thing I got a mild electrical shock so I stopped touching it for the most part. Holy shit I’m not even in the cockpit, I’m in the john drinking some vile contaminant out of a huge bottle and muttering at the ceiling. I really should choose between this and flying airplanes, I shouldn’t ever try to do both, but as I’m already doing this blah blah blah -
I regained consciousness in some gigantic airport, soldiers and cops everywhere, somehow I’d pulled it off again, I was walking around, blabbing to other people dressed as pilots, buying stuff, just like a normal person. The horror overtook me at bar number two or three, when I tried to light a cigarette, no smoking allowed anywhere ever, and all those soldiers and cops everywhere, can’t I get through 15 minutes in some state of relative peace? I had to think, there had to be someplace to smoke somewhere, others like me would completely flip out if there wasn’t. The first step was to figure out which airport I was in, so I asked the bartender and he said something incomprehensible to me, he must’ve noticed because he continued, more slowly and loudly, “you are in Denver, International”, and with those utterances my horror was transformed into sheer panic. Denver X is one of the biggest most confusing airports ever, and most of them are huge and confusing. There was one designated smoking area somewhere in the thing, a filthy 10ft Plexiglas cube in the middle of some random cavernous walkway somewhere, my chances of finding it were slim at best, I was ready to kill myself when I heard the sound of cheap dress shoes running and my mind leapt to the sound of those shoes, I looked out to the walkway and saw another Captain just like me, running for his life, and in a flash I was after him, when it comes to smoking cigarettes my mind is filled with lightning, somehow that warrants whatever decent circuitry is left.
I was grateful to this Captain, but I still screamed at him to slow down, the Captain never misses the flight, all Captains know that.
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