Fried Logic

9:40 am on June 5, 2010 by Maximillian Hill

"There has been an emergency reported in this building"

Do you ever have one of those days where everything goes wrong? You spill coffee on yourself, you’re late to work, you rear-end a cop at a red light. Well imagine that but with a flat tire on a plane and being in the airport during an emergency evacuation. It’s pretty awesome.

Of course, when I say “awesome” I mean crappy, as you can imagine. My 7:50am flight from Raleigh to Chicago was delayed due to one of the tires having the wrong pressure. Obviously, they’ll need a new tire, because this one is shot, or some such, so they have to BUY ONE from another airline.

Let me repeat: there are no spares on hand and they will need to BUY ONE from another airline.

Ok, that’s cool, do that. Nope. They can’t legally do it. Which is crap.

So now they’re going to fly one in for us on the next flight. The flight that lands at 9:30am. Not too bad. Wait an hour and a half for the next plane, then 30 minutes for the tire to be installed and 30 minutes for us to board. We’ll be off by 10:30. It’s like taking candy from a baby. A baby blue whale that has a lightsaber and a bad temper.

So while people call their loved ones (it’s only 8am here, and we’re all flying to the WEST which means they’re calling people at 7am or earlier) and complaining that United doesn’t just carry a spare tire on every flight, I relax with a thrilling game of Fieldrunners on my iPad. After burning 45 minutes with that (I won, of course), the alarms in the terminal go off.

Maybe it’s a false alarm? It’ll shut off in a moment. Nope. A soothing, computer-generated female voice comes over the intercom: “May I have your attention please. There has been an emergency reported in this building. Please stand by for further information.” Will do robot overlord!

After maybe 5 minutes of that, the word “fire” was inserted in front of the word “emergency” and we were told to evactuate calmly. So like cows marching to our deaths, we all file out the door and onto the tarmac.

A gentleman enjoys his breakfast under Terminal 2 at RDU

Sweet. We have 100+ people from the terminal all huddled on the tarmac now. The building not 50 feet away may be on fire, and we can’t get on our plane which is 200 feet away ’cause one of the tires, the same tires it had just LANDED on, has funky pressure. A short 15 mintues outside and we’re heading back into the terminal, so we can wait for our new tire.

The trouble with all this, is that most of us will miss our connections. That’s bad. So now they need to squeeze us onto new flights that are all sold out. Double awesome.

Maybe I’ll get body-slammed by a TSA officer and I can call this trip a success.

*Awesome photos by me.