Burt Prelutsky has a very amusing piece about people who are chronically late:

When you live in Los Angeles, as I do, people are constantly arriving late and then using traffic as their excuse, as if they had no reason on earth to expect there might actually be other cars on the road. So, first they insult you by keeping you waiting, and then they follow up by insulting your intelligence. Do they imagine that I, who somehow managed to arrive on time, came by helicopter?

How true. I say this as someone who constantly struggles to arrive on time. Like right now, I'm supposed to be driving to New York, and I'm already running late. Why? Because I hate driving, and I hate traffic, so I put it off until I absolutely have to. But that is as irrational as it is irrelevant and unfair.

You'd think in the more than half a century I've been on this planet, I could learn to tolerate traffic. But what is tolerance? I seem to get less tolerant of banal annoyances as I get older, and the timeworn wisdom of "do the thing you fear and the fear will go away" does not apply to traffic. Or patience.

I say this as I'm making myself late by avoiding traffic by impatiently writing an impossibly impatient post about the impossibility of patience.

Air travel is even worse, because it doesn't matter how "on time" you are, as you'll be made late, and there's no revenge. I found myself sympathizing with the woman who got ejected from the plane because her baby kept saying "Bye bye plane!"

As an attendant reviewed the flight safety instructions, Garren began to bid Houston adieu.

"There was a plane next to us, and I pointed it out to Garren, and he started saying 'Bye, bye plane,' over and over," Penland said.

Distracted and upset by the boy's words, the flight attendant went over to Penland after completing her safety demonstration.

"She leaned over the gentleman who was sitting next to me, and she said, 'OK, it's not funny anymore. You need to shut your baby up," Penland said.

Penland said she told the flight attendant that she expected her child to fall asleep momentarily.

"'It doesn't matter. Regardless, I don't want to hear it,'" Penland said the flight attendant told her.

"'It's called Baby Benadryl,'" Penland said the attendant told her, suggesting she give her child allergy medication to help him fall asleep fast.

"I said, 'Well, I'm not going to drug my child so you have a pleasant flight,'" Penland said.

The discussion continued and very quickly what started as an unpleasant flight for Penland and Garren became no flight at all.

The flight attendant told the captain that Penland had threatened her, and the captain agreed to taxi the plane back to the gate, where mother and child were told to disembark.

Other passengers who witnessed the argument were stunned, and came to Penland's defense.

Fellow passenger Sandy Taylor said the flight attendant came back and "in a real arrogant way she says, 'We're going back to the gate.'"

There's more and more of this stuff, and a recent WSJ piece has a gruesome collection.

If this Times piece is any indication, passengers are starting to help each other out against their uniformed oppressors (a bad sign for the airlines -- as the usual pattern was more like savage competion):

Like her, I've noticed that passengers comport themselves remarkably well on stranded planes, even amid appalling conditions like backed-up toilets and a lack of food.

"Because things are so bad right now with the delays and missed connections, I really feel it's become an 'us against them' attitude." Ms. Ogintz said. "I think people actually tend to be nicer to each other than they used to be."

Like many passengers on stranded planes, she saw how people looked out for one another. "Five hours was a long time to be sitting there, and I noticed people tried to help each other. If somebody had an extra snack, they would give it to somebody with a kid," she said.

In another incident, a pair of unaccompanied children were abandoned by Delta Airlines after missing a connecting flight:

The family of two children traveling alone from Alabama to Alaska says Delta Air Lines abandoned the unescorted minors for more than 20 hours after they missed their connecting flight in Salt Lake City.

Fifteen-year-old Blake Sims and 10-year-old sister Briana locked themselves in a downtown hotel room until an aunt in Do- than, Ala., arranged for an off-duty Salt Lake City police officer and his wife to pick up the children, feed them and return them to the airport to resume their cross-country trip the next day, said their mother, Adriana Ables.

"They are doing good. The older one, he was a trooper. The little one, she was fine until she saw me, and then she was real upset," Ables said from her home in Fairbanks.

The July 1-2 ordeal is the latest in a chain of incidents this year that have stained the public's view of U.S. airlines and stoked enthusiasm for a passenger bill of rights. With jets jammed, fares rising and the on-time arrivals and departures at record lows, frustration levels among passengers - and the parents of two minor travelers - are rising.

Makes me never want to leave the house. Do I have to?

Yes! And right now. I hate to be late but it will always be a lurking possibility until the day I'm officially declared "late."

A video Ann Althouse mentioned last night made my unconscious mind look for and find this video -- "Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James and the Shondells.

(In 1968, it was a lot easier to fly.)

Through some inexplicable process, this led me to search out and find Tom Petty's original "Learning to fly" video.

(Hmmm... Decades later, seems we'd forgotten how to fly.)

Might be too late to learn.