Jeremiah Tolbert

You have two choices when some­thing wildly crappy hap­pens to you. You can get upset and feel sorry for your­self for a while.  That’s per­fectly okay.  Or you can see the inci­dent for its ridicu­lous­ness and laugh about it.  You’re going to get to the sec­ond one no mat­ter what.  Not every bad thing turns into a funny story later, but most do.

I’ll give you an exam­ple.  I did a semes­ter abroad in Kenya study­ing wildlife man­age­ment. Studying abroad was prob­a­bly the one thing about col­lege I was most excited about.  However, my trip out of the coun­try went about as wrong as it could with­out killing me.

First, the night before I was sup­posed to catch my flight out of Amarillo, Texas, a freak ice storm hit.  I spent that evening look­ing out of our motel win­dow and watch­ing power trans­former explode in blue flames all along the high way.  I fran­ti­cally tried call­ing my pro­gram to let them know about what would cer­tainly be a delay, and the air­lines to try and resched­ule flights.  The hotel’s phone sys­tem died with the power, drop­ping me out of calls.

A day late, the air­port finally reopened.  I was to take a small turbo prop to North Carolina.  We climbed aboard and waited.  The pilot spun up the engines, and hor­ri­ble black smoke poured out of the left engine.  The engines turned off and we waited.  They told us we needed a mechanic, and we dis­em­barked.  Six hours later, a man dri­ves up in a pickup truck, hops out, goes to the engine, pulls a spark plug, replaces it, and dri­ves off.  We reboard and fly to North Carolina.

On my next flight, it becomes clear that there are sud­denly two peo­ple for every seat, and it’s because the pre­vi­ous flight going to NYC had run off the run­way with­out even tak­ing off.  We spend an hour while they beg peo­ple to take free tick­ets and get off the plane.

My flight out of NYC is delayed on the run­way when a woman begins scream­ing and cry­ing hys­ter­i­cally and run­ning up and down the isles.  Once she’s calmed, she explains in frac­tured English that she’s left her purse, con­tain­ing her pass­port, in the ter­mi­nal.  They radio back, get it on the next flight over, and we take off.

By the time I make it to London, I’ve been awake for over 36 hours.  I have a 12 hour lay­over, so I decide to take the train into London and buy a bus tour of the city to see some of the sites.  I notice some­thing peculiar—the city changes around me in a blink of an eye.  The tour guide, a young woman about my age, leans over from the mike and explains that I’d been asleep for the last five or six blocks.  She tells me to go ahead and sleep and she’ll wake me up when we get back to the train sta­tion.  And she does.

In the air­port I sleep some more, and I wake with a start as I hear the “last call” for board­ing of my flight to Kenya.  I make it just in time, run­ning up right as they attempt to close the doors.  The per­son in the seat to my right trains attack dogs for liv­ing.  He spends the entire 10+ hour flight talk­ing about it.

As it was hap­pen­ing, I was mis­er­able.  What else could go wrong?  Now it’s my most-​​trotted out anec­dote.  It’s the fun­ni­est thing that has hap­pened to me. In retrospect.

You might as well skip the feel­ing bad part and go straight to the laugh­ing.  That’s what I learned this week.  What about you?