I was taking a quick Tuesday morning flight to Atlanta for work and I had a plan. I wanted to wake up at 4:25 a.m, shower and get all of my stuff together with plenty of time to spare. I wanted to play some music, read for a few minutes, and then leisurely head out the door. That almost happened…
My co-worker, Karen, and her husband, Dan had arranged to pick me up at my house at 4:55 am. and head to the Orlando International Airport. When they arrived at the appointed time, they texted me and texted me and texted me until they had done it four times. I heard none of it because I was still asleep.
Now I am the type of person who doesn’t like to be late to anything, and typically I am not. After Karen sent those four texts and got no response, she and Dan decided to try another approach. Dan came to my door and knocked loudly two times. This time, I heard it. At that moment, my head swung to the left, my eyes popped open and my quick twitch fibers kicked in. I quickly pulled my black iPhone, which was sitting on my bedside table, right out of the charging cord. I hit the home button and saw the time. It was 5:09. Dang it!! I slept right through all seven alarms that I had set to get up between 4:17 a.m. and 4:28. a.m.(In hopes of actually getting up at 4:25am).
I immediately sprang out of my bed like a rocket and ran to the front door. I could see Dan and Karen sitting in their car and they could see me.I put up one finger to indicate that I would be out in one minute. In a flash, I closed the door and began racing around my house. I was wearing a pair of shorts and no t-shirt. I tore through my bedroom like a bat out of hell, pulling on a pair of blue dress pants and grabbing clothes as fast as I could put them on. I snapped up the first two socks I saw and pushed my feet into my dress shoes. Then, I grabbed my toothbrush, zipped up my suitcase, and headed for the door.
Seventy-seven seconds had past by this point. My heart was pounding out of my chest because I hate being late to things. I got in the backseat of Karen and Dan’s 4-Runner car and we started our drive to the airport.
At that moment, I thought that running a sprint in my bedroom and attempting to get dressed at the same time was hard, however, that turned out to be the easy part. I immediately felt bad because I was late and I was pretty sure Karen was frustrated that I was potentially going to make her miss this flight.
We quickly started talking about the fastest road options to get us to the airport. Typically, the trip takes is a 32 minutes drive. But with the plane departure time of 6:20 a.m., we only had 67 minutes to complete our mission.
Should we take Semoran Street? Should we go on Interstate 4? Check the maps, what does Google say? We decided to take the Interstate route, a possibly risky decision because of the continuous construction on that interstate. Fortunately, there were not many cars on the road due to the early hour in the morning.
As we got closer to the airport, both Karen and I realized that we did not have our boarding passes downloaded to our phone. This resulted because the tickets were booked by a third party and there had been a problem with the download. That meant that we were going to have to stop to print our boarding passes at a kiosk when we arrived. Of course, that was going to add time to our tight schedule..
As we pulled up to Terminal A at the Orlando International Airport, we were slowed down by a mass of red brake lights in front of us. As luck would have it, we were flying Southwest Airlines, which was one of the last gates of the Terminal.
Traffic was slow but we attempted to stay calm. I knew we needed to speed things up. When I spotted JetBlue Airlines, which was the very first gate, I hopped out of the car, backpack on, rolling suitcase by my side, and I took off running for the Southwest kiosk at the end of the Terminal.
Dan then drove Karen to the Southwest gate and met me at the kiosk. As I was running, one man said, “good luck!” Another woman gave me a look like, “ you need to watch where you are going.” I was guilty, I almost ran her over.
But I made it to the kiosk, printed both boarding passes and was finished by the time Karen walked up. Then we did some speed-walking to the TSA pre-check line ,and bypassed the 47 minute wait in the regular line. It took us four minutes to get through the line.
We then got on the tram and got to our gate. It was an amazing 39 minute adventure from the time I left my front door to the time I arrived at Gate 101 at Southwest Airlines.. Remember, typically getting to the airport is a 32 minute drive by itself. We made it in record breaking time.
The moral of the story, and there is a moral to this story, is to sign up and get TSA Pre check! HA, I’m kidding, Actually, no I am not, get TSA Pre Check. It might change your life.
On a more serious note, things don’t always turn out how you plan them in your head. Stuff happens. I can count on one hand the amount of times I have been late to something, and this was one of them. The only thing I could do was embrace the mess, embrace the ambiguity, and try to make it better. I also assumed Karen would be mad at me for being late, but in reality, all of the conversation in the moment focused solely on how would we solve this problem and get to the gate before the doors closed.
Finally, this was a good example that, sometimes, it is fun to have moments like this. It reminds us that we are alive. It reminds us not to take ourselves too seriously all the time because mistakes are inevitable. All in all, if you ever end up in a situation like this, there is only one thing I can tell you. Hope you have TSA Pre-Check!!:)