I spent the night in the Denver airport last night.
When the red banner … CANCELED … marched across the screen and the line began to form at the ticket counter, I had visions of how horrible it was going to be. Spending the night with hundreds of other people, trying to get comfortable on hard plastic seats, and trying to ignore the bright fluorescent lighting might turn out to be the worst six hours of my life. But you know what? It wasn’t that bad.
Except for the NOISE!
Have you seen that airport reality show? I forget the name, but the show chronicles real people in real time as they experience problems at major airports. I saw the show once, which led me to fear the night I was about to spend in the airport. The episode I watched featured a mom and her three kids who were stuck in Atlanta. After what seemed like hours, the mom finally reached the ticket counter where she stood without shoes … and how she came to be standing shoeless at the ticket counter was never explained. She had three kids under the age of ten hanging off her pants and, not so coincidentally, her pants were nearly dragged below her waist. Maybe that’s how she lost her shoes. So the disheveled mom was standing at the counter speaking to a young man wearing a heavily starched and perfectly pressed white shirt with a purple paisley ascot tied around his neck. His outfit perfectly matched the expression of disdain he wore on his face as the mom tried to yell above her crying children and book a new flight.
I might add here that one mistake many parents make is thinking that everyone likes their children and dogs.
Luckily for me, my night in the Denver airport was nothing like that. The young man at the ticket counter was very pleasant and helpful as he explained that since it was a weather problem, the airline would not be offering hotel vouchers … snap! He did direct me to an empty gate down the escalator, which had a couch and dim lighting. As I settled in and arranged my sleep mask, there was just one problem—a constant loud, whooshing sound interrupted by three perfectly spaced, repeating beeps that never stopped.
All night long.
My usual tactic in these instances is to fight noise with noise. When the kids were little, trips in the car could sometimes get too loud. Maybe it was an objection to the feeling of confinement while strapped tightly in the car seat, or just a general protest, but when they got loud, I got loud … with the radio. I didn’t want to distract myself from driving and try to reason with them. Once I glanced in the rearview mirror and verified that they were still strapped in, I knew there was nothing more I could do, so I turned the radio up loud enough to drown out the crying. It almost always had the desired effect. They quickly got tired of trying to out yell the radio, and then I turned it down.
Unfortunately, there was no radio to turn up while I tried to make the best of my night on the airport couch. The next morning, I noticed I had been joined in my secret grotto by several other travelers who all seemed to be wearing the same style of large round headsets, which led to my discovery. The secret to spending a night in the airport, and maybe even driving in the car with crying children, is …
… noise canceling headphones.