I just flew in from the East coast.

Boy, are my arms tired.

I vividly remember my first business trip: an overnighter to Dallas to learn about how to administer some new-fangled thing called a 401(k) plan for the company I worked for.

Yes, I am *that* old.

But I was so *that* young at the time that I was excited about the fun and heady glamour of being able to say “I’m on a business trip.” I was to find in later years that the only thing that exceeds that initial, giddy pride of my first work travel is the ability to slip the phrase “my editor” into conversation.

My career has mercifully not required too much travel over the years, but enough that I don’t jump up and down and yell, “YAY! BUSINESS TRIP!” when my boss calls with that travelin’ gleam in his eye.

This last trip was just the frosting on the cupcake, thanks to an airline that shall remain nameless. I’ll only tell you that their name rhymes with “Smelta.”

Fortunately it was not Smelta’s fault that it took us two hours to fight through New York City traffic to get to JFK. Unfortunately for Smelta, they had nothing to do with the superior service we received from Enterprise Rent-a-car, which will not remain nameless because they deserve the shoutout and quite frankly Smelta should go stand next to Enterprise as often as possible so they can borrow some of The Big E’s shine.

We waved goodbye to the Enterprise shuttle driver, not knowing that Ramon would be our last glimpse of competence for the day, and boarded the Air Train that circles JFK. We knew from our boarding passes that we needed to disembark at terminal 4, and so we did.

As it turned out, there was precious little on our boarding passes that was accurate yesterday.

At this point, experienced travelers and knowledgeable New Yorkers are saying, “Dude! 4’s an international terminal!” And even my coworker and I, country mice from Phoenix that we are, knew that. But we reasoned that it would be ridiculous for an airline to biff a boarding pass that way, because their passengers would kill Smelta if they were forced to run to a completely different terminal as they struggled to make their flight.

So that’s why we stood in the middle of terminal 4 listening to a pleasant gate agent tell us that no, we needed to be in terminal 3 but not to worry! there was an efficient shuttle waiting a football field or two away, just waiting to take us to gate 7.

So we hustled. It’s worth noting at this point that I’m traveling enough now that I have invested in luggage that stacks well and rolls well so I can do precisely that through airports. I was confronted with enough stairs during this jaunt, however, that I had to keep unhitching my luggage so I could hoist my carryons (which are better suited for that rolling thing than that lugging thing) up and down them.

We made it to the shuttle, which took us and a few other trusting souls (fools, all of us, who dared to believe our boarding passes) to terminal 3, just in time for us to eat a bite and make the boarding, which our passes had told us would begin at 6:34.

At 6:33 we stood in front of another cheerful gate agent who scanned those lying excuses for boarding passes and informed us that they had been boarding that plane for an hour. Oh, and that when we proceeded through the doors we would not see a jetway connected to a plane. We’d be boarding a shuttle bus that would take us to, you guessed it:

For all intents and purposes, back to terminal 4.

At this point, I have completely lost patience with everything and everyone. The only reason you’re not reading this on Huffington Post right now as an incoherent explanation about why a Phoenix woman started slugging Smelta representatives right there on the tarmac is that I was traveling with a coworker I respect and admire and I didn’t want to embarrass him in public.

So I unhitched my bags one more time and lugged them down steep steps and hoisted them onto, I swear, the same forsaken bus of the damned that had ferried us across the Stygian surface of JFK’s tarmac in the first place. I consoled myself by figuring that we’d get into that terminal again, head down a jetway, and then, for the love of God, take off.

But no: the shuttle stopped on the tarmac next to a waiting plane and nothing would do but that I unhitch my luggage one more time and haul it up another steep set of stairs before I could settle into the familiar routine of edging myself down the aisle, trying not to run over the feet of people who seemed to think I should be able to navigate a one-foot wide aisle without disturbing their auras.

Smelta continued their onslaught on my sensibilities by assaulting my senses with ads throughout the flight and self-congratulatory announcements and failing to provide any food service. They did manage to land us an hour early but I refuse to give them credit for that, as there is ample evidence to suggest that the %$@#& boarding pass was wrong yet again and that Smelta just doesn’t know yet how long it takes to fly from JFK to Sky Harbor, pretty much the same way that they don’t know where the heck or when the heck they’re boarding their own planes.

And you know what they say about an airline that can’t find its planes with both hands.

© E. Stocking Evans 2012