It wasn’t that bad a day — for LaGuardia. Some strong gusts of winds in the morning resulted in two-hour departure delays by the end of the day. I had snagged a rare first-class upgrade on the 7pm flight back to O’Hare, but when I got to LaGuardia at 6:15pm and found the 5pm flight still there, it was time to call an audible. I gave up a couple of free drinks and (more importantly) 7 inches of leg room — moving from seat 2B on the 7pm flight to seat 30F on the 5pm (but now 6:45pm) flight — to have a chance to see my kids before they went to bed. It really wasn’t that bad of a trade-off. I even arrived early — 20 minutes before my 7pm flight would’ve arrived (had it been on-time).

Life wasn’t so good for the guy sitting next to me in seat 30D. He laid his jacket on the middle seat, loosened his tie, rolled up his cuffs, dropped his head, and was asleep — sitting straight up — before we pushed back from the gate. When the drink cart rolled by, he bought two bottles of white wine to my one bottle of red. Halfway through my bottle, the plane hit some big turbulence. We were bouncing up and down, and my wine was sloshing just up to the rim of the little plastic cup. The guy saw this and moved his jacket over to his lap, saying a bit wearily, “That would just be the perfect end of a lousy day.” He was trying to get home to Omaha, was certain he had missed his connection, and wasn’t confident that he had many alternatives.

This guy came to mind when I watched The Delay, the first of three short films produced by Ritz-Carlton Hotels and American Express. The first few minutes of the film were spot-on — the downcast trudge through an empty airport when you finally get to your destination. The rest of it, though, pounds the product placement a bit hard — the one-second pause so we can fully visualize the Amex Gold card being handed over for payment, the empathetic Ritz-Carlton desk clerk mentioning the time the spa opens in the morning. It’s nowhere near as good as any of BMW’s The Hire films from 2001/2002, but the opening sequence perfectly captures the mood of a head-hanging day.