Should I Worry Now?

In the face of unpleasant, unexpected news, it is often a good practice to begin fretting right away.  Other times, it's better to wait.  Here is an example.

A few weeks ago, Cassandra and a group of colleagues were visiting a very far distant place for official purposes.  They had a fixed date to return to the US.  Airline reservations for that date that had been made many weeks earlier.

Then the news:  the airline was going on strike for three days early in the departure week (departure itself was set for the weekend).

Cassandra's teammates leapt into several different forms of action:  calling the airline to confirm the departing flight; calling the local travel office to talk about alternate departure arrangements; fretting aloud, with many, many 'what if"s; such as, if the airline piles up a backlog of people who were ticketed on the canceled flights, they would 'have to' give those customers 'our' reserved seats, and bump us farther down the line.

Now, Cassandra is an experienced world traveler, but not an expert.  Nonetheless, she is quite sure - and has never been proven wrong on this - that an airline always wants to do its best to get rid of its customers and get back to normal as quickly and efficiently as possible.  And she means 'get rid of' in the best possible way:  the airline wants to make sure that those customers get where they are going, as close to the time they want to get there as possible under the circumstances, without creating and endless daisy chain of de-seated customers.

She also believes that making dozens of phone calls to already-harried workers, and being generally demanding and unpleasant, get one absolutely nowhere that one wants to go.

So while the rest of her group fretted, Cassandra went antique shopping.  The strike started on schedule, ended on schedule, the airline borrowed seats on other airlines to get the affected customers to where they wanted to go, and by the time the weekend arrived all was serene.  The group left on its scheduled flight, on time.

Here is another of dozens of examples.  Once upon a time, Cassandra's flight back to the US was delayed by several hours of bad weather.  By the time it landed, her connection would have already departed.

Did Cassandra fret?  Nope.  And she was right not to to so.  As she walked into baggage claim to pass through US Customs on entry, there were several uniformed employees of her airline already on duty, passing out tickets for later flights to the customers' destinations.  They had even spelled Cassandra's name correctly on the envelope.

When should a traveler really fret?  Well, in Cassandra's experience, never.

If a flight is delayed, she waits.  If a flight is canceled, she finds out what the airline intends to do with her instead.  If the airline is snowed in and/or frantically clueless, she waits.  Because what good does fretting do?  None whatsoever.  She packs lightly, and always has a toothbrush in her handbag.  In her years of traveling with small children, she always had a couple of spare diapers in her handbag and was willing to ride an escalator or moving sidewalk for seven hours if necessary, until the child collapsed into exhausted sleep.  (BTW, no child or adult has ever starved to death in any airport, anywhere in the world, despite the hysterical claims of those children's parents, or the adults themselves.)

If departing looks unlikely, as if - for example - she might have to sleep in the airport like all the poor lost souls in the news videos, she goes to a hotel and pays for her own room.  This might be more expensive than waiting wanly or furiously for the airline to sort out the disaster, but Cassandra does not much like hapless, short-tempered crowds and is willing to pay to stay out of them.

Now, here is the point at last (and it's about time):

Travel - even to the corner to buy gas - is a crapshoot.  You might get there, buy gas, and get home in less than ten minutes.  You might end up broke (or rich, or married, or under arrest) in Wichita, Kansas.  Like so many other things, including restaurant menus all over the world, Cassandra's philosophy is to order what she thinks she wants, then wait to see what actually comes.

And besides, some of her most pleasant memories have come from unexpected detours.