Was I tackled on an escalator just now? It’s hard to say. Either way, though, we’re taking a break from relaying my complaints about last week’s travel inconveniences (and travel-adjacent inconveniences) to address this morning’s travel inconvenience.
Dallas-Fort Worth is a large airport. Spatially, it covers a lot of ground. This is probably a good idea. Spread things out to start and it’s easy to expand inward if you want to down the line. Also, I’m assuming land is at many points very cheap in the Metroplex, though as I’ve mentioned before, much of my impression of the Metroplex comes from people who have lived in the Metroplex and have chosen to cease living there.
Anyway, big airport. Takes a while to get between gates. You have to take a train, unlike Atlanta, where you can take a train (and it speeds things up) but you don’t have to take a train. The terminals at DFW are evidently little satellite campuses, kept apart from one another and connected only by tarmac and rail so that they, I don’t know, never join forces and try to be more convenient for travelers trying to get from one to the other after their first flight of the day was delayed by American Airlines’ Austin-airport maintenance crew taking 35 minutes to get to the plane to flip one simple switch.
The point of this scree is not that American Airlines is scheduling connections too close together and screwing even themselves over in the process. The point is that people at DFW need to learn how to ride a motherfucking escalator.
Walk on the left, stand on the right. These are the rules of escalators. Washington D.C. is great about this. They will shame you if you mess it up. As for the rest of the country: How have we not learned? Common core could’ve spent one hour a year on escalators and this nation would be a less injured place.
I wasn’t technically tackled on an escalator. I tripped. I tripped trying to cut between a person responsibly standing on the right and a person three stairs up—a dumb fucking crew member who should know better and deserves to lose their job if not be thrown in jail for indirectly assaulting me. I tripped over the dumb fucking crew member. It’s as though escalators are not designed for swift, agile cuts while wearing socks and birkenstocks and carrying your father-in-law’s Father’s Day gift in a reusable grocery bag the handle of which just snapped when you hung it around your neck for a second so you could rest your hands while an entire plane-full of people jammed into the aisle, all also trying to make their irresponsibly-imminent connections due to the maintenance crew in Austin that better have been doing some great work at one of the other six American gates.
Thankfully, I am a durable beast, and the gift was durable and helped catch my fall. But damn. Stand on the right.
