The $2.11 cookie

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If you’ve ever had to kill considerable time in a “foreign” airport, you’ll understand the tale of woe that is the $2.11 cookie.

That, by the way, is pronounced, “two-dollar-and-eleven-cent cookie.”

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I was supposed to connect flights in Denver, a simple one-hour layover that gives just enough time to dash from gate to gate.

Thanks to the good folks at United Express and Skywest, it turned into a five-hour stop, sending my business trip into the dustbin.

No human being in his right mind would spend two dollars and 11 cents for a cookie, even one made from crack. These cookies were about 4 inches in diameter, bigger than average but not super gigantic dental nightmare big.

At the airport, you spend that much for a simple dessert. And you spend $10 for a sandwich, chips and drink.

Even on the company card, that doesn’t sit well with me.

The cookie, so you know, was good. Not “slap-your-mama” good, but not bad like so much airport fare.

Lately, Denver’s airport has been beset with weather-related problems: snow, ice, freezing temps. But this delay was like so many airport and airline snafus, caused by bad management.

Our plane landed on time. We pulled up to the gate, only to find it occupied with another plane. The pilot (I refuse to call him captain unless we’re all given ranks in this private air force) says we’ll be at another gate in a few minutes.

We sat on the tarmac for a bloody hour.

I could actually see my departure gate through the window from my seat, maybe a two-minute walk across the concrete from the plane.

When we pulled up to an open gate, we waited again, this time for someone to “drive” the jetway to the door. Mind you, we could’ve used the staircar, seeing as that’s how we boarded the plane originally. Heck, we could’ve used one at any point to exit the plane and enter the terminal.

Naturally, I missed the connecting flight. Next available seat would be on a plane leaving in four hours. My day was shot.

At the service desk, no apologies from the airline. The woman in front of me received lunch vouchers for “volunteering” her seat (in addition to the free ticket). I got squat.

This day was becoming expensive, what with my missed appointment and now trapped-at-the-airport lunch.

Everything that goes wrong with travel can be packed into that $2.11 cookie. Sweet as it was, the dessert didn’t remove the sour taste left from that extra hour on the ground.

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