13. “You Better Hurry”
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While walking to my gate at LAX, I noticed a woman whose dog was in the middle of doing its business. The woman was loudly face-timing with her back to the dog, so I assumed she didn’t notice. That was likely the thought shared by the gentleman who tried to get her attention.
“Excuse me, miss?” he said in a polite tone. The woman glared at him. “Your dog,” he sheepishly continued, pointing to the mid-poop pup. The woman rolled her eyes and went back to face time as the man slinked away, seemingly embarrassed.
“Some people,” she bellowed to her face-time companion with no hint of irony, “are just so rude.” When her dog finished, the woman started walking away, leaving everything right on the airport floor.
Another woman tried to stop her. “You’re not going to clean that up?” she asked, as shocked as the rest of us were. “They have people for that,” the offender replied, disappearing into the crowd.
I stood near the pile and warned people to walk around it while someone else got a maintenance worker’s attention. No one said anything – we were so shocked that anyone could be that horrible. When I got to my gate, the woman was there, too.
Great – we were both going to Tokyo. When I travel abroad, I get embarrassed by other Americans doing things one hundred times less embarrassing than leaving animal dumps on the floor of an airport.
To make it worse, her dog was barking at everyone who walked by. Everyone else tried to ignore her, sitting as far away from her as they could. I am not everyone else.
I sat down right next to the horrible woman. “Are you going to London on business?” I said. “I’m going to Tokyo,” she responded gruffly. “Oh,” I said. “Then you better hurry. That flight got moved to gate 53C. This is the flight to London.”
I figured I could give her a little moment of panic as payback for how terribly she was treating everyone. I didn’t predict what would happen next.
She grabbed her bags and her dog in a huff and stormed out of the gate without even checking. She was so self-involved she didn’t notice that the monitor at our gate still said Tokyo, and almost everyone at the gate was Japanese.
I don’t know if she made it back to this flight before we took off or not, but I didn’t see her board, and I didn’t hear her dog. Whoops. Maybe she can re-book on another airline. I hear they have people for that.
