They get you with a series of little lies, because they know that you’d never accept the cold, hard facts all at once. So instead of telling you that you’re not going to get home on time, the gate agent starts out telling you that your airplane has just now landed from Jamaica, and they need to let those passengers off the plane, and do the security checks, and get the crew on board, and defumigate all of the pot smoke, and whatever else it is that they do. You should be able to begin boarding after that. Estimated arrival time in Huntsville has been delayed from 9:30 p.m. to 9:55 p.m.

So I’ll get home 25 minutes later than planned, no big deal. Once you get on the plane, the pilot announces that due to all of the weather delays, there “fifteen or twenty” planes ahead of us in line, so it will be another 25 minutes or so that we’ll sit on the runway before we can actually take off. Didn’t you know that there were fifteen or twenty planes ahead of us before you made us all cram into the plane? But, OK, another 25 minutes. That’s not such a long time, is it?

We finally take off, and the pilot announces that the flight time should be about 30 minutes. And technically, that may be true, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be getting in your car to drive home in 30 minutes, it means that, best case, the plane will be on the ground in about 30 minutes. And then you’ll sit on the runway for awhile, while the pilot drives around looking for an open gate. And then there’s baggage claim, where you wait for twenty or so minutes until the realization sets in that your suitcase just isn’t there, and so it’s off to stand in line and file a claim. Finally, you get on the road around 11:15 p.m.

At least I didn’t need anything out of that suitcase. The man in front of me (who spoke with a comical Johnny Wishbone-like islands accent) was traveling to Huntsville from out of town and had nothing but the clothes on his back. I do hope that Delta eventually found his luggage.