“It’s just not our day folks”

This is really not something you want to hear your pilot say, especially if your flight is already 40 minutes late because the plane has been back to the gate to offload luggage for some people who never showed up for the flight (we all imagined some elderly couple desperately hobbling around, trying to find the right gate, and stubbornly refusing to ask for help, but there’s always that slight chance that someone wanted to ship something they shouldn’t have, so on the whole we all approved of that decision). This time, though, it was a broken hydraulic pump (apparently we’d done too much taxi-ing on a hot day) and to add to the fun, we had to wait for a tug to come pull us back to the gate. It was going to take an unspecified amount of time to fix the problem, but we should all stay seated like good little sheep. Thank the powers that be that I didn’t decide to be cheap and turn in my business class ticket for a coach class one and the $500 incentive! (In the end, we actually got off the ground only 2.5 hours late.)