LAX aka Dante’s Inferno

By Sally Franz

Just for the record, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is a cesspool of stupidity. Every time I am there, they are in construction hell and every time that means a major screw-up for my connection.

My husband and I flew into LAX from Mazatlán, Mexico (MZT), which is a clean, well ordered and classy airport. There was supposed to be a wheelchair waiting for me. (I have Transverse Myelitis, a disease that limits my mobility.) There was no wheelchair. With my husband’s help I made it up the jet way. At the top of the jet way there were ten wheelchairs. One was reserved for me. I was told by a wheelchair coordinator that all people in chairs had to be brought without their traveling partners down a hall, down an elevator, through customs, and then we would meet our loved ones on the other side of customs.

That is poor decision making on their part because it means that the person who helps the one in the chair is not with them. It means that the paperwork has to be split up. It means that my husband, who does not do a lot of traveling, has to negotiate all the misleading signs down the half constructed below-ground hallways to and through customs by himself.

And as convoluted and crazy as this “plan” was by separating and causing people in wheelchairs untold anxiety (because I may be a gimp, but I travel enough not to trust a word airport personnel say — especially about “meeting up” with someone in customs)…for some unknown reason I said yes. For three whole seconds.

As I sat down in the wheelchair and watched my husband be carried away with the crowds like so many corpuscles in a clogged artery, I asked the attendant why she was not taking me to the elevator. She answered, “So . . . there are ten wheelchairs on the flight and only two people to push them. First we have to get all the people into the chairs. Then we have to take you two at a time down the service elevator. Then we have to take you all two at a time down a back hallway and then one at a time through customs and then two at a time to meet your party.”

I had a 40-minute connection. “Are you kidding me?” I immediately saw a new business opportunity. Private wheelchair platinum grade. I will give you $40 to get my travel partner and me through this malevolent morass called LAX on time with low anxiety…and here is the genius part of the idea–TOGETHER.

I said looking into the attendant’s face, “I doubt that this was your idea, you are likely only paid, and barely that, to push people…but this is the stupidest way to solve this construction diabolical on the planet. And I would ask to speak to a supervisor except I don’t have the time to waste and they are likely not authorized to do anything about it anyway. Is that about right?”

Then a person with a clipboard stepped forward (aka the one in charge of the grand wheeled Exodus through the bowels of the Sinai) and said these words. “You HAVE TO do it our way, you will never make it down the stairs and through that long hallway by yourself. Stay in the chair.” Wow! In all fairness, she was young. She had, no doubt, been to Manager and Assertiveness 101. But methinks her course did not include the fact that those of us who are older have stopped believing that the one who screams loudest is right or in control.

I stood up, on my very painful feet and throbbing legs, leaning on my cane and replied, “You are wrong. I don’t have to do this. Furthermore,” I said, as I stretched up to my full stature, scouring my med-head brain for the ultimate threat, “I am a writer and this WILL go into my blog.” And here it is for your perusal.