Rome Tomorrow

Well, I'm off to an interesting start. I am not yet writing from the Tuscan Broadband, but rather from the Jamaica, NY Broadband. Since my flight from DCA to JFK was delayed three hours, I missed my flight to Rome, and am now in a Holiday Inn close to the airport. I did get quite a workout running from the terminal I arrived at all the way to the international terminal last night, which I accomplished in under ten minutes. Unfortunately, my plane to Rome was the only one that left JFK on time yesterday (and, in fact, it left four minutes early), and so the only real good that came out of my dash was some cardiovascular exercise.

I must have looked so distraught upon the discovery of my departed plane that a security guard came up to me and started trying to help me out. He actually tried to bully a Delta agent into stopping the plane, and she looked at him like he was crazy. When he finally left me to find the Holiday Inn, he very cheerfully told me to find him when I returned to the airport the next day. Even after sleeping on it, I am still not sure whether I would prefer to avoid him or have his help.

I very much hoped that someone would be rude enough to merit my yelling at him, but all the flight agents were very kind (if somewhat dense). Rather than finding someone to take my anger out on, I ended up playing with two little boys and their transformers while their mother cried to an agent. I quickly learned that transformer toys are very entertaining but not great for taking out aggression.

It took 40 minutes of waiting outside in the middle of the night for the Holiday Inn shuttle bus to arrive, during which time I chatted with an incoming Harvard freshman. He was awed at my college graduate status and we spent quite a bit of time contemplating the arrival, loading, and departure of a smartecart truck. At first, it seemed natural to load up all the smartecarts from the airport and drive them away for the night, but upon further discussion, we began to realize that such actions made very little sense. What could they possibly be doing with the smartecarts at night? Where were they going? Surely not to be powered off or charged or cleaned or refurbished. It seemed unlikely that they would need storing. I have thought about those smartecarts almost incessantly since I saw them loaded, and I have still not come up with a solution.

So today I am in Jamaica, NY, reading about international law and contemplating the destiny of smartecarts at night. Rome tomorrow.