Snap Crakle and Pop

So this last weekend, I had to work. I hate to work the full weekend, it ruins my week. I got up very early Friday morning to go to work and it was raining pretty bad, so I knew there was going to be traffic. I left the house early and got stuck in traffic about 15 minutes away from work. Now, when I first started this job, the company scared you to death about being late, even if it was only a minute. You could lose your job and they didn't care about the reason blah blah blah. This has stuck with me for a long time, even though policy has changed a little bit. Anyway, I got stuck, but still had an hour to get there (there are some really slow buses I have to take from the employee parking lot to the airport terminal, so I always give myself plenty of time--because of the whole 'you're late for a second and you're fired thing'). So anyway, there I am, gridlocked on the freeway. I have never been gridlocked before and it's really nerve racking and boring; especially when it isn't even 6 AM yet and there is no one to call and talk to. So after an hour of multiple conversations with scheduling, the gridlock clears up and I start driving through the rain like a bat out of hell to try to get to work so I can get my plane off on time (ten minutes late, but my first officer was stuck in it too!); however, the whole entire day ran late due to legal working requirements, so we ended up in Harrisburg, PA for the night.

We needed to get up early and fly to Cincinnati. Well, we got up again at a extremely early hour (less than six hours of sleep)and headed off to Cincinnati. Well, the flight started and I was doin' my thing when I noticed it was really loud, but nothing really unusual, so I start tellin' the folks that I would start to serve them soon when the captain calls. When he does call me, he tell me he can't get the nose gear up and that we may have to go back to Harrisburg. So I decided to sit down and see the outcome of this little adventure. So about 20 minutes later, I get a call and... well, we have to go back to Harrisburg. I asked the captain if he wanted to make an announcement or if I should. He said he had too many checklists to do so I did it...Okay. So I make some nerdy announcement that is trying to be non-alarming, but it makes no sense. We sit for another 10 minutes and then it sounded like I was listening to a bowl of Rice Krispies, and the whole entire cabin started misting and my brain went into over-load. I was thinking "Holy Crap we are decompressing. Where is my oxygen mask? Why isn't my oxygen mask coming out! Maybe if I put my hand to catch it! And the big scary noise won't scare me if I'm ready. What were those pops, are soda can busting open?" Then the cabin cleared up and I still had my hand in the air waiting for my mask, looking like a goof. So I got on the PA and said we had decompression (trying to calm people down; most of them actually were calm) but we were still safe to breathe.

Twenty minutes later we landed on all wheels and were back in Harrisburg. As one of the passengers gets off the plane he said he knew we were in trouble when his bags of chips busted open. I went into the cockpit after and it was trashed. I didn't know such a tiny spot could be so trashed. Big buttons were pulled that I had never seen pulled before. Manuals were thrown everywhere, and the captain was on the phone saying he didn't push that button because he didn't get to read that far in the checklist. I totally have an new appreciation for all the training pilots do. We had a few things go wrong besides the landing gear, and it turns out the decompression was all part of the master plan of saving our hides. I really couldn't tell you what went wrong, because it's mostly jargon. I did think that it was funny that two women slept through the whole thing and were very confused to end up in Harrisburg again instead of Cincinnati.