[Missed the earlier installments? Scroll down, lovely reader, and you’ll find them. -jones]

I was all business as I made my way through the overcrowded Toronto airport, lowering my shoulder if needed. I might or might not have knocked the wind out of a man in a trench-coat who was looking at his phone instead of looking at where he was walking. If I did, apologies to you, good sir. Please look where you are going next time. I was desperately trying to recall the protocol in Toronto for switching from a Canadian flight to a U.S. flight. My best guess was this: customs (a pair of hissing, Death Star-like doors marked with a sign that says “U.S. FLIGHTS”), then fetch my luggage from the baggage-claim area (which is challenging, as the baggage-claim in Toronto is as large as a Tie-Fighter hangar), then haul said luggage to a completely different terminal, then check in for my flight, re-check my luggage, then board a propeller plane the size of a squirrel trap and fly to Syracuse where my old parents were no doubt already waiting curbside in the “NO STOPPING” zone for me, because they’ve never been late, not one second late, for anything, ever in their lives.

The Air Canada employee manning the hissing doors—a nice lady with a vulpine-looking Santa Claus faced pinned to the lapel of her sharp blazer—would not make the hissing doors open for me to U.S. Flights because I did not have a boarding pass for my connecting flight. She pointed at a nearby kiosk. I dug my passport out of my carry-on and, once again, attempted to do battle with another one of these god-forsaken kiosks.

The passport reader, for some reason, decided that it was suddenly partially blind and could not properly “read” my passport. I tried again. Nothing. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my fingertips. I held the passport flat and steady, trying not to move it, hoping that this would help the reader suddenly be able to “see” again. I peered at my watch. I had less than 35 minutes to reach my gate. Finally, the reader cooperated. Momentum began to shift; things, I was certain, were going to go my way from here on out.

Now, normally the kiosk allows you to input your name and destination in the name of locating your booking—two pieces of information that were easy enough for me to provide (Scott Jones, Hancock International Airport, Syracuse). But the kiosk asked for something I couldn’t possibly know off the top of my head. It needed my “booking reference number.”

As anyone who has ever flown already knows, there are a great many numbers associated with any plane ticket. In fact, any plane reservation is approximately 60-percent numbers. Like a man trying to defuse a bomb, I whipped out my cell-phone, searched for the email from Air Canada that included my flight information, and tried to suss out which one of the great many numbers in the email might possibly be the “booking reference number.”

I looked back at the machine. A message had popped up onscreen with a 10-second timer that had already counted down to four. “WOULD YOU LIKE MORE TIME TO COMPLETE YOUR TASK?” the kiosk asked.

“GODDAMMIT, YES,” I said, loud enough for a family passing nearby—mom, dad, two small girls—to observe me as if I was a Natural History Museum exhibit of “Modern Day Angry Man.”

I punched in more numbers. Still nothing. Twenty-five minutes until my flight for Syracuse departed. For the first time I began to entertain the thought that I would not make it; I felt the first ice-cold touch of despair in my stomach. “Come on, come on, come on,” I said. I punched in more numbers. Nothing. Sweat was forming on my temples and running along the sides of my face. When I sweat, which is unfortunately quite often, the face is where my body tends to dispatch all of its sweat for some reason.

It eventually dawned on me that this was an exercise in futility. That I could punch in all the numbers from all of the Air Canada emails that I’ve ever received, and that it would be a cold day in hell before this kiosk would give me the boarding pass that I so desperately longed for. (Of course, in retrospect, knowing what I know now, the reason this kiosk wasn’t cooperating was because my flight to Syracuse no longer existed. I did not know that yet, but would soon.)

I gathered my things and decided to plead my case to the woman with the vulpine Santa Claus pin on her lapel. “I’ve tried everything, and I can’t get a boarding pass out of the kiosk,” I said. I tried to smile and be charming, two things which have never come easily for me. “Aw, honey, I see what you’re talking about,” she said. “You go on through.” The space doors hissed open. All I had to do was walk through them and I was on my way. I was congratulating myself for being an aggressive, savvy, and one charming-assed individual when I noticed a line of miserable-looking people on the far side of the doors that was no less than a a hundred-people long. At least 10 babies were crying. The place looked like a refugee camp.

“You wait in that line over there, and someone will help you get your boarding pass,” she said.

“But my flight leaves in 20 minutes,” I said. “All I want to do is get on my plane.” Then I said something ridiculous, that I didn’t plan on saying. I said, “My mother and father are waiting for me!”

“All those people are in the same situation you are in,” she said.

I panicked, realizing that I’d made a mistake, that waiting in this line wasn’t any kind of answer. I figured that someone back in the terminal might be able to sort this out for me, so took a step back towards the hissing doors. “I can’t let you back out here,” the woman said, physically putting her tiny self in my way. “Once you go through these doors, you’re technically no longer in Canada. Wait in that line. Everything is going to be alright.”

And with that, she pressed a button, sealing me in with the doomed and the damned.