ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Today we audited our final office for the week in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Between the shitty weather, the snitty New Jersey people we ran into, and our general desire to just go home, we were in a fairly pissy mood by the time we finished. Then the office manager and the division guy from Rochester (the same guy who saved my life with GPS in Ohio/Pennsylvania!) invited us to lunch at this place called Town Tavern, and we didn’t really have an excuse to say no since they already knew we weren’t flying out of Baltimore until like 7:30. Longest lunch ever. Also, best lunch I had all week.

Last night at the Turkish diner, I was going to order crab cakes again, since, well, I love them as I love life itself. But my New Jersey friend told me that ordering fish at these places is a terrible idea, and sort of implied that it could be the last decision you ever made. I halfway didn’t believe him, since my impression is all the frying eliminates bacteria and parasites, but I went along with his advice because he’s the local, not me. However, the Town Tavern appeared to be a much nicer establishment than Michael’s Diner & Restaurant, and it was full of authentic Italians. So I basically had no reason not to trust their crab cakes. Since Italians are inherently trustworthy. For this reason I had a crab cake sandwich for my final lunch on this trip, and it was well worth it. Second best crab cake I had all week. Just thinking about it is bringing back the pangs of withdrawal. Incidentally, the crab cake I had in New Jersey was the same as the Chesapeake Bay variety of crab cakes available in Maryland.

Even though the people and the lunch were very nice, my coworker friend and I were were dying to get out of New Jersey and back on the road. It wasn’t that our lunch companions were objectionable in any way. It was more like how when you have company over all week, by the end you really just want to put on your crappy old sweatpants with the holes in the butt and lay around watching trash television and acting like a no class wastrel. Which you can’t do in front of company.

So as soon as we got in the car we both looked at each other and my coworker friend said, “It’s not that they sucked, but we just had to get out of there. We’ve been trapped here too long! It’s like we just gotta scream—”

“FUCK!” we shouted in gleeful unison.

When we got back on I-95, we discovered that while it costs $10 to get into New Jersey, it only costs $8 to escape from New Jersey. I think this is because the Baltimore tunnel costs less coming south. Like they’re punishing you for leaving. Back in the neighborhood of the airport, we had some time to kill but really didn’t figure it was worth driving around in Baltimore and risking getting lost. So when we arrived at our gate, the flight before us was not even remotely ready to board. But this didn’t mean that we were going to sit around slacking and failing to plan ahead. That’s the kind of thinking that gets you seated near the back of the plane.

Because Southwest does the “cattle call” style of boarding, where all passengers are grouped into seating classes A, B or C based on time of check-in, the quality of your seating arrangement depends entirely on two things: (1) how many preboard passengers will come out of the woodwork at boarding time, and (2) how far up in your class line you are. A-line passengers essentially get first pick of the plane, and therefore have a much higher chance of getting the seat they really want. My coworker friend and I have spent time analyzing this, because we feel that in general there is a direct correlation between personality type and boarding class. Because it’s first-come-first-serve as far as class assignment goes, the people who really like to sit in a certain seat or who just like to have first crack always wind up in the A-line. People who forgot or who just didn’t have access to a computer and didn’t think it was that big of a deal end up in the B-line. And people who switched flights at the last minute, or who all around don’t give a shit either way, end up in the C-line. We are true-blue A-line personality types.

And at the airport, there are particular behaviors that support these archetypes. There are always a few die-hard A-liners who will viciously and ruthlessly fight each other for the privilege of being up near the front of the line. Although we try not to be rude to other passengers, my coworker friend and I always do our best to be very first. This is difficult when people play by different rules and do things like cheat, or cut outright in line. Anyway, we were sitting there in the first seats beside the A-line when we began to notice other probable A-liners from our flight starting to close in. One man had positioned his bags carefully next to the rail so he could scoot them under and just duck into the line when the last person had boarded. Another man had gotten behind him and was obviously planning to do the same thing. Then we noticed two granola type women whom I suspect were a gay couple, and they had gotten in at the end of the previous flight’s A-line so that they’d be first in this A-line. It was silly, but this annoyed us a lot. So we went up there and started to close in. Because if enough people did this, we might end up in the middle of the plane or something. And then we might not get off quickly in Kansas City, and we might miss the blue bus that goes to economy parking. And etc, etc.

We couldn’t do anything about the two granola ladies, but it looked like the second man who had claimed a spot in preparation to get into the A-line right away might give us some grief. But he stayed off to the side. We started to analyze him, which is what we do sometimes in airports. We pick a stranger who looks interesting, make up a name for them, and then observe them and try to decide what they are like. We have a Dan from the Baltimore airport last year, Scott and Nicole from the Detroit airport last year (long delay, had to analyze two people), and a Michael from Chicago Midway this year.

So we started working on what we thought about this guy. First, it was obvious he is very outgoing and has no trouble getting women. He’s single now, but he was married for 4 to 7 years when he was young. He is 42 or 43 years old. He works as a consultant, probably in IT, and travels regularly based on his behavior in line. Usually I am in charge of naming the people we analyze, because I happen to like naming things, and I decided this guy could be named Mitch or Mick or Mike or some other short M-name. He is probably the sort of man who is so outgoing that if he talks to many single women around his age, I bet they end up with the wrong idea about him, meaning that he is friendly and they probably think he is more interested in them than he is. But he talked a lot to some old people on the plane, so I think he is genuinely friendly and not a player.

Then we actually wound up talking to him on the plane. He sat behind me and across the aisle from my coworker friend, although he begged her to sit beside him. Partway through the flight he revealed that his computer has a GPS device on it, and he kept us posted for the entire flight whenever we passed points of interest, such as major cities or Pizza Huts. We ended up in a long conversation with him, and he made some comment like if we were going to guess such-and-such about him, what would we think? and I revealed that we had already done so. This was groundbreaking for us because it was the first time ever that we’d talked with one of these people, and so he started checking us on accuracy. He was 43. And he has a four-letter M-name. He works for a software company but is not a consultant. He is unmarried now but was married for three years in his early twenties. This was just about the funnest conversation I had ever had on a plane.

So what it comes down to is, are my coworker friend and I really good at guessing people, or is he just really transparent? Hard to say. It turned out that he is a former Republican (like me) who abandoned his party because of its stupid reliance on religion for a moral compass, and he also dislikes religion like my coworker friend and I do. It can be hard to find people like this in Kansas City. At the end of the flight he gave me his business card because I said I’d enjoyed talking with him and was sorry that we would probably never meet again. Then he got in a taxi and sped away while my coworker friend and I waited for the blue bus and discussed him.

All in all, it was a pretty good trip. Except, where will I get crab cakes now?