Sleep Deprivation in Denver

It's 7AM and I'm sitting in the Denver airport. I didn't sleep a wink last night. Not wanting to waste a single minute of my visit to Milwaukee, I was hanging out with Holly until 3:30 in the morning. My flight was scheduled to leave Milwaukee at 6:30 in the morning. I decided that it wasn't even worth trying to sleep for an hour before waking up at my originally scheduled time of 4:30.

I was dragging ass by the time that I got to the airport. When I checked in at one of the Northwest electronic ticketing kiosks, I discovered that my flight to Minneapolis had been cancelled. Instead I was going to be routed through Denver and had an extra 25 minutes before my flight left.

I felt like the walking dead by the time that I got to my gate. I chose a seat where I could lean back and rest my head on a pillar behind me and tried to get some sleep. As I drifted in and out of consciousness I glanced up at the monitor displaying the flight information above my gate: departure time, 6:55AM, current time, 542. I drift back out of consciousness again. What time is it? Departure time, 6:55AM, current time 542. Good, still plenty of time.

One more time in and out of consciousness. Departure time, 6:55AM, current time 542. At this point it should have disturbed me that I had been in the airport for more than 45 minutes and yet not a single minute had passed according to the clock I was looking at. It should have, but it didn't; I was too disoriented. Later I would realize that the reason that the clock never changed was because the current time that I was looking at, 542, was actually the flight number and not the time at all.

As I slept I dreamt that I heard someone calling my name. It sounded something like, "Will the passenger Daniel Christensen please report to gate...". Wait, was that a dream? I open my eyes and look around. The terminal is empty. All of the other passengers that had been surrounding me during my last period of consciousness had now vanished. Had I dreamt them too? I was confused and disoriented. My flight didn't leave until 6:55 and it was still only 542.

Still I thought that I had better check with one of the gate agents. For some reason I looked around and tried to locate the source of the voice. It occurred to me that the voice must have come from the PA system and that the direction of the voice would not only be impossible to discern but would be totally irrelevant even if I did. Still I looked. As I scanned the terminal I was disturbed by how empty it was. Not only were the passengers gone, but all of the employees seemed to be as well.

I finally located a lone gate agent. As it turns out he was actually manning the gate sitting directly in front of me, but as you've probably been able to gather, I really wasn't all that lucid at this point. "I think I heard someone call my name", I said to the gate agent. "Are you Daniel Christensen?". "Yes, why?". "You really need to get on that plane. It's about to leave without you." Holy Crap. I had almost slept through my flight departure.

The flight from Milwaukee to Denver was way too short. I passed out as soon as we got into the air and what felt like 2 minutes later we were touching down in Denver. This was and probably will be the only time in my life that I wish that the flight would have dragged on for hours longer than it needed to. Why couldn't they have just circled for a couple of hours? Didn't they know that I needed the sleep?

So, here I sit in the Denver airport. I have nearly 5 hours to kill before my next flight leaves. I figured that 5 hours of dead time in an airport justified the $6.95 for wireless internet access. I have books to read but I don't think that my mind is clear enough to handle reading Doestoevsky right now. Then again, I'm not so sure that it was a such good idea to write either.