Unlike the students I work with at an elementary school, people in airports make me feel like I’m actually a patient person. No matter how many times I travel through airports, peoples’ impatience never ceases to astound me. There’s always the man in line two people behind you in security who continuously rolls his eyes and shakes his head, sighing about the slow-moving line. It’s almost as if he doesn’t realize that, unless he is late (in which case he wouldn’t be in this line because they would rush him through in a different line), he got here at least two hours before his flight so he has nowhere to go and plenty of time to get there. Then, once it’s time to board, there are the people who act like they’re in some sort of life or death competition involving getting on the plane first. If you’re lucky enough to get a front-row seat in the waiting room, you can sit back and watch this competition and experience the same level of entertainment you get from watching crappy reality television. The people that jump up as soon as boarding starts are all the same. They don’t make eye contact with one another because they are enemies. They hold their suitcases with a death grip and try to get as close as possible to the person in front of them without actually stepping on them. They shimmy through the pack, practically elbowing little kids out of their way, and cut off as many people as they can, stopping at nothing to make it to the front of the line. I so badly want to understand these people, but I never will. The sooner they board, the more annoyed they’ll get once they’re in their seats. They’ll have to get up that many more times to let someone pass and they’ll have to sit in those uncomfortable seats even longer, where they will use the old “sigh and head shake” to show everyone how annoyed they are that the plane hasn’t taken off yet. Sometimes I like to join the pack and purposely let people go in front of me in some sort of an attempt to prove to people that it doesn’t matter when they get on the plane because, in the end, we will all get on…but no one ever buys it. They know deep down that if they don’t make it onto the plane before everyone else, they will lose their seat on the flight and then die in the airport waiting room…and there’s nothing I can do or say to change that.