AirTran was very nice about the hour-long delay coming out of Chicago, but we lost precious minutes at every turn. They said we’d arrive in Atlanta around 11:15pm, and they were right, but we didn’t make it to the gate until 11:45pm, at least. 30 minutes sitting in giant, jet-engine airplane traffic after a measley 80-flight is a little obnoxious.

But so what? That’s nothing, really. It once took me 24 hours to fly from Phoenix to Atlanta (I could’ve gone to India in that time), so this is no big deal.

Then I realized: All my recent airplane suckage has happened while I’m headed back to the ATL. For two years, I’ve been snobbishly arguing that O’Hare is still the busiest airport in the world (I have no idea if it is), but the truth has been going right over my head: Having the busiest airport isn’t something to be proud of, it’s a reason to apologize.

I’ve never met anyone who says, “Come on over to my house tonight. It’s great, you’ll love it: we have the busiest street in the world out front!” The sad, secret truth in Chicago was always this: O’Hare wasn’t the busiest airport in the world because everybody wanted to come to the Midwest. It’s the same with Atlanta. Folks are just passing through. They’re not here to see us.

So the hour I spent getting my luggage on Sunday night seems silly. Or, rather, not so much silly as asinine to the point of turning my blood into hot knives. Sometimes this kind of shared agony bonds strangers together, leading to smiles and shrugs as we wait for our lot to improve. Other times it makes you want to drop a scripted, erudite, confidence-crumbling, audience-winning Sorkinesque monologue on the laughing schmucks taking up space by the baggage claim just to close out the scene and get the fucking credits to run on an episode you’re done with.

AirTran’s baggage carousels were down, so we had to get out bags from one of two other conveyors. No problem, except we have nothing to tell us which of two carousels our bags will arrive at, so those of us traveling alone have to wander back and forth between them wondering how concerned the TSA or the airline can be about our security when anybody can just walk off with our bags at this point.

Want to double the chance that your bag will be lost at the airport? Crowd around the baggage carousel so that you reduce the visibility of everyone not just over the baggage but over the other folks standing there like pigs at a trough.

There’s nothing I like better than seeing some strange passenger at the airport walk up to the carousel and throw my bag on it after I’ve been waiting forty minutes to find it. Something like this happened to me a couple years ago. The guy realized he had the wrong bag after he’d gotten to his car and had opened it up. Then he dragged it back and left again with a bag that looked nothing like mine. I hadn’t seen him leave the first time because you can’t see anything around the carousel after a flight. He could’ve just as easily kept it. So, people, back the fuck up.

While I’m thinking about this anecdote on Sunday night at carousel A or 4 in the baggage claim section, a huge dude in a polo shirt walks up to me and says, “Is this the AirTran pick-up?”

“Who even knows?” I say. “This is one of the two, but we don’t know what flight’s on what carousel.” I shrug.

He says nothing else. He just turns around and takes one step forward, exactly plugging the gap I was using to watch bags go by. We’re talking, then he just turns around and stands there in front of me.

“Excuse me, sir,” I wanted to ask him (and twenty other dudes over the course of the night), “Are you going to the hospital after this?”

“Uh, no,” he’d say.

“Then what’s the fucking rush? Back up so the rest of us can see.”

Instead, of course, I just seethed and loathed quietly, ’cause that’s how we do it in the Midwest.