Wednesday 18th August 2010

I am such a dickhead.

There have been many points in my life where I have brandished myself with such a term (polishing a lit fireplace, walking around Wrexham with my dress tucked into my bag, asking a boy ‘so, ever had any diseases?’ on a date…) but this one takes the ticket. Literally.

Since the end of camp is rapidly approaching (can I get a 2 DAYS LEFT hoo hoo?), I thought it might be a good idea to check my flight to Atlanta. I logged onto my gmail, searched lastminute and up pinged the shiny ‘Here is your confirmation of spending all of your student loan on the first day that you got it, you massive nob’. I scrolled down, found what I was looking for and started to chuckle. For days I’ve been whinging about having to get the 5:18am train to catch my flight and lookey here, my flight is a good hour and a half later than I thought. Where on earth I got the time 10:20am from is unbeknown to me.

I’m about to click off the page when my page scrolls down and my eyes gloss over my flight home. It reads all the normal, boring stuff:

Atlanta Hartsfield Intl Apt (ATL) to Manchester International Apt (MAN)

Airline: DELTA (DL)
Class: ECONOMY
Departing: 19:35 Wed 25 Aug 2010
Arriving: 08:45 Thu 26 Aug 2010 Next day arrival

I smile at the information, hit the red ‘x’ just as I realise- wait. The 26th August? Aren’t I flying home the Friday? I smack my mouse pad against my browser icon and whilst waiting for it to load, I’m already thinking ‘lastminute are such idiots! Why have they got my flight wrong?’ By the time I’ve reloaded the email, I know that I’m the idiot. The great bumbling idiot that has managed to go for 2, nay 3 months, thinking she was flying home on Friday 28th August. Not only this, this idiotic ignoramus has made plans to see, meet, celebrate and socialise with people when she is not actually in the country. This perfect twit has also got a lift sorted for Saturday morning, noted ‘I’ll be back in the country on 28th’ on the bottom of job applications and made arrival plans at home on the night of her believed return. All of this is complete poppycock. All of this is just a figment of her imagination.

Once the initial shock and the ‘shitting hell, Chelsea’ took over, a niggle ruptured within me and my mouth let a giggle slip. Within seconds, I was sat on the couch roaring like a laughing gas addict. I don’t even want to start to wonder what they thought I was doing in the office next door but all I could do was laugh, think ‘Chelsea, you plonker’ and laugh some more.

Perhaps I should have been dwelling on the fact that 2 days of visiting friends in Atlanta have been swiped from beneath me, but in all truth, all I could think was ‘this time in a week, I’ll be on a plane, freezing to death with their rampant air con whilst I watch some syrupy love story that makes me weep into a Belgian man’s armpit who in the end asks me to move because his wife is getting jealous, and old women with mouths daubed with red lipstick will be trotting up and down the aisle in what seems like a how-many-times-can-you-say-y’all-to-the-passengers-without-one-stabbing-you competition’ and I thought 'ah, by gum, I cannot bloody wait'.