Caroline and I meet at our gate at Dulles. She’s been traveling once 1:00 am Arizona time, so when we meet at 4:00 pm EDT, it’s already been a really long day for her. I only had a 20 minute flight from Richmond, so I had a whole 3/4 of a productive day.

We board and push back from the gate, and then we go nowhere. For a long time. After about 20 minutes the captain explains that the baggage in the cargo hold *might* not be loaded correctly, but they are waiting for more info. We might have to go back to the gate for the cargo team to reposition. Sure enough, 10 minutes later, back to the gate so they can put the bags in the right place. By the time we take off at 6:30 pm we are 1.5 hours behind schedule. With a 10 hour flight ahead of us, that’s a lot of extra sitting around time we could have done without.

As one of my friends said, how hard is a job you have done right 5,768 times this week to get it wrong on the 5,769th?!