Something I hate

One of my biggest pet peeves is Dulles airport. From the main arrivals hall (looks elegant from outside but feels cramped, dark, empty, and disconnected from the rest of the airport from the inside) to the horribly uncomfortable seats which were clearly not designed by someone who recognizes that airports frequently entail a lot of waiting, there are lots of things that bother yours truly. However, nothing really annoys me more than those hulking behemoths, those giant creaking caskets on wheels that dodge in between taxing airplanes. I'm talking of course about those utilitarian sounding "People Movers" (if you are so heavenly blessed to have never encountered one much less been forced to use one, a picture is provided). These vehicles seem outdated, slow, and gauche although, I cannot fathom a time in which they would have been modern, fast, and cool - and if such a time ever existed I would question the value of life.

It was with great dismay that my last day in the United States involved boarding one of these creepy crawlers and being jerkily shuttled to my terminal located in another state (as the length of the journey would have me believe). Yet I was met with promotional signs on almost every vertical surface in the boarding area which heralded the dawn of a new golden age: "The People Movers will be replaced by the new AeroTrain [a sleek light rail type contraption] by December 2009." My giddiness was palpable. Yes, I would be leaving the land of the free and home of the brave enslaved in a packing crate but I would be returning via the liberating comfort of modern transport.

However I was alerted to an article today which has crushed my hopes and dreams and added a rotten mildewed cherry on the top of my long and painful week: the AeroTrain will not be in service until January. January isn't good enough! By then I will have come and gone! But do the airport or the engineering company care? Not at all. This is perhaps the greatest miscarraige of justice I have witnessed in some time. That is saying something because just this day my Dad emailed me to tell me that the draconian DC parking authority sent me a letter denying my appeal of a parking ticket from July (You can't have two zones coexisting on the same street without proper signage! Mon Dieu!)

Oh yeah, and one of my flatmates lost her mother-loving mind and kissed goodbye to her sanity forever. But more on that another day.