Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport: The Center of Hell

The tram at the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport. There are various trolls and headcrabs hiding in that cart thingy.

There comes a point in every person's life when they realize they will not live forever and, sooner or later, they will have to travel through the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport. When Jesus died for our sins roughly 100 years ago or so, He had no idea that our sins would eventually stack up like a gigantic pile of rat corpses and form the framework for the HAIA. If Jesus (or even God for that matter) knew what lay ahead for all humanity, they would've never bothered getting into all those fistfights with the Egyptians while converting bread into water and AC into DC. Besides the fact that I harbor an intense passionate hatred for every single living organism there, I don't have anything against Georgia or the remarkable features that great state has to offer, such as 140% humidity and a collection of buildings which once allowed people to enter inside them at some time in the mid 18th century.

The Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport has baffled the scientific community for decades now, bewildering various people who wear highly scientific white lab coats and use remarkably scientific tools such as "a hammer" and "a pen that was stolen from a particularly unimpressive hotel franchise." The central oddity powering this manmade terror dome revolves around the fact that an evil genius somewhere somehow managed to create this airport which not only links every single flight throughout the entire universe, but also serves as a central direct hub between our dimension and Hell. As Albert Einstein or possibly Thomas "Ed" Edison wrote in an especially spicy issue of Consumer's Digest, "no object can occupy two locations at one point in time, unless the object in question is one of Louie Anderson's thighs." Despite this concrete law of classical physics, the HAIA somehow manages to bend space and time in a way which produces the following disastrous results:

1) No matter where or when you decide to travel, you will invariably be forced to travel through the Atlanta International Airport regardless of Atlanta's proximity to your final destination. If you're traveling from Los Angeles to Seattle, you will be forced to stop in Atlanta. If you go out hiking and decide to swim down a stream, you'll invariably encounter the Atlanta International Airport midway through your journey. If you try to pick a friend up from the Denver airport, travel officials will forcibly pull you out of your car and throw you on a plane bound for Atlanta. Every form of transportation everywhere goes through Atlanta's airport, and when the Earth is nothing but a charred lump of clay 1,000 years from now, the only remnant of our glorious civilization will be the hulking remains of the Atlanta airport, which will be used by a super-intelligent race of centipede monster aliens who inexplicably have to stop there on their daily commute from Neptune to Pluto.

2) No matter what time of the day or year you get stuck in the Atlanta International Airport, it will be full of approximately one hundred jillion billion people, most of which have been aimlessly wandering the terminal since it was first built in 1768. Some of these so-called "people" are actually just ghosts of previous victims who died trying to reach their target destination a few decades ago. It's like that one scene in "Hypercube" where you see the people moving in slow motion for all eternity because they shamefully realized their agent mistakenly cast them in one of the worst movies to ever land on a DVD, only without the horrendous acting and (lack of) plot. If you walk up to any person trapped inside the Atlanta airport and attempt to say "hello" to them, there's a 38% chance that they will not understand your English greeting. This is not because they are natives of some foreign country, but rather due to the fact that when they first entered the airport, English had not yet been invented.

3) 59% of your "flight" will actually be spent driving along the runway and periodically stopping. If you're traveling from Atlanta to London and the trip is estimated to be 18 hours, then your plane will aimlessly drive around the HAIA terminal for roughly 10 of those hours. Of course I have no idea how long an actual flight to London would take, as I don't have any idea which state that city is located nor why anybody would want to visit it, but my complete lack of knowledge is perfectly balanced out by my complete lack of giving a shit. If you're taking a trip to a closer city, such as Seattle, your plane will actually drive the entire way there. Atlanta has special highways just for HAIA flights.

4) Your flight will be delayed for an obscene amount of time ranging from one hour to one century. Airlines enjoy performing an exciting stunt known as "overbooking" in order to properly inconvenience customers who might have otherwise accidentally been convenienced.

A map of terminal C.

The procedure of overbooking is a highly exciting process that airline executives and thinktanks spent years upon years and millions of dollars researching. It's a very complex and intriguing phenomenon, so let me attempt to explain it by writing an analogy, a Greek word made up of two parts, "anal" and "orgy," which obviously makes it very obscene by my fundamentalist Christian Mormon Baptist standards. Say you walk into a car dealership and bring one of those Colombian druglord briefcases full of cash money. You see a car which the dealership is selling for $25,000 total, after figuring in all the kooky little fees such as "undercarriage toner replacement covers" and "state Federal local municipal principality tax." Once you finish throwing concussion grenades to separate the hundreds of swarming car salesman from your underbelly, you manage to give a dealership representative $25,000. In exchange he gives you a piece of paper claiming you now own the car. However, when you go to drive it away, you discover that a Mexican family of four is now sitting inside your newly acquired vehicle and driving it into a wall while screaming in some nonsense gibberish language. The salesman explains that he mistakenly sold "too many" cars and now you'll have to sit around and wait until the next shipment comes in. But hey, while you rest comfortably on their floor for the next day, you are welcome to enjoy some free coffee and maybe a muffin that was imported from 1986! If you're feeling particularly frisky, you can even read the issue of Time Magazine next to you which features an in-depth portrait of Mikhail Gorbachev!

Various pleased Delta customers express their feelings at the customer service station.

Every single flight passing through Atlanta is overbooked because this is the only way the city can trick people into staying there overnight. You would assume that the most basic mathematicians would point out the potential problems in overbooking flights, but I guess the folks at Delta Airlines possess some mystical fountain of knowledge which explains the hidden mysteries of life that folks like me and maybe some guy a bit fatter than me cannot figure out correctly.

DELTA AIRLINES EXECUTIVE: "Hmmm, it says here on the chart that we have 238 people booked on a plane that only has 150 seats. Is this a problem?"
DELTA AIRLINES ENGINEER: "No."
DELTA AIRLINES EXECUTIVE: "Well I don't know what we're going to do, how can we fit 238 people on a plane with 150 seats? Do you know?"
DELTA AIRLINES ENGINEER: "No."
DELTA AIRLINES EXECUTIVE: "Let's go get drunk with the pilots."
DELTA AIRLINES ENGINEER: "Okay."

I don't mean to infer that all Delta pilots are drunkards; the only lushes that I've personally encountered on Delta have been the ones piloting my flight. Besides, I'm sure some of them don't get drunk before each and every flight. A good portion of them probably decide to abstain from alcohol and instead shoot heroin directly into their eyes, a fun and viable alternative in the fresh and in your face airline industry. If, for some odd reason, you think that I may currently be "embellishing" my story or "enhancing" the truth by "lying" and then trying to "cover it up" by adding in "extra quotation marks," then allow me to present some further proof: every single Delta flight I've taken has shown at least one episode of "Will and Grace" during the trip. For Christ's sake, "Will and Grace!" Nobody anywhere has ever attempted to watch "Will and Grace" without drinking beforehand, and if anybody ever tries to claim they did, then they were obviously drunk and blocked out that portion of the day. Hell, the entire cast and crew must be drugged up and sedated before every episode in order to conserve the copious amounts of annoying sass needed for each show. Did you know that medical science is unable to produce an artificially-improved lifeform which can produce enough spunky sass required by that obnoxiously screechy woman and the flaming homosexual guy in each episode of "Will and Grace"? It's true; the producers have to use highly secret alien technology throughout post-production in order to give the show that sassy and in-your-face comedy we all have grown to know and love! Oh you crazy homosexuals, when will you ever learn?!?

"mwag gwahh maph blaaargh"

In addition to the aforementioned "phun pheatures ™" of the Atlanta International Airport, the complex features a stunning "it's really fucking long" layout which resembles a pregnant mall designed by an insane Nazi war prisoner. Lead architect James R. Wilkinson, one of the people directly responsible for Georgia's concrete monstrosity, had this to say about his part in designing the airport: "I hate people. I hate you. I hate people. I hate I hate I hate I hate I hate I hate I hate you all. The only thing consoling me in life is seeing the faces of those I've wronged float up before me as I mock them. You will all die at my hand. Humanity is a waste." To prove his undying contempt for the human race, Wilkinson made sure that every single aspect of the Atlanta airport was as unpleasant as possible. Although the terminals are essentially a long series of concrete blocks attached by a tram that is composed of 96% human sweat, there is really no logical progression between sections. At any given point in time, there is a good probability that your luggage will come spewing out of a wormhole that opened in a random location throughout the airport, most likely a Starbucks that has been under construction since the Cold War. If this festive event does occur, you can rest assured that the good people in the luxurious Airport Command Center floating five miles off the ground will be more than happy to inform you of this sudden change in plans by announcing the news over the intercom, "mwag gwahh maph blaaargh." I heard rumors that, at one point in time, people in Atlanta actually used their mouths to speak, but alas that time was long ago. Now, for the sake of efficiency, they employ a team of robots with distortion pedals and a Radio Shack microphone from 1963 to blurt out such colorful announcements as "all luggage and passengers were recently vaporized by the rogue Ion Cannon attack on the runway" and "the airport is now officially on fire." These messages invariably end up becoming "mwag gwahh maph blaaargh" thanks to the cutting edge voice mutilation technology licensed by the kind folks at HAIA, so if you ever hear a voice saying "mwag gwahh maph blaaargh" during your layover, you should either start rushing towards gate B-18 or call the police, whichever seems more appropriate at the time.

I'm not exactly sure why I felt the need to inform the public of the horrid menace that defines the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport, as statistics show over 92% of you have already been there and another 5% are currently stuck there right now. Experiencing the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport is one of those experiences that we must all accept before we're able to mature into a mature adult man, even for you women and girls out there. The HAIA doesn't discriminate between any race, gender, or religion! All it knows is pain, like the ship from "Event Horizon," only without the luxury of having Sam Neill inside of it, and it will turn you into a man regardless of your previous sex. If I wasn't terrified of John Ashcroft personally coming over to my house and beating me to death with a bag full of broken ceiling tiles, I'd plead for somebody to do something drastic about that cursed airport, such as teleport it back to Hell where it originally spawned. I'm sure "teleportation" violates one of the Good Patriot Citizen 100% American Go Team Ashcroft laws that he passed a year ago, so I'll instead settle for voicing a public warning and reminding everybody to never leave your homes. No matter where you go, no matter who you want to see, and no matter what time you plan on leaving, you will, sooner or later, have to pass through the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport and endure the wasted lies that fester inside its rotting skeletal system. Jesus may have died for our sins, but we'll all die for the sins of the Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport.

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Ryan "OMGWTFBBQ" Adams saying hello out there in Internet Land. Hello. Rather than spew pure nonsense like usual, I've been told to go with a minimalist approach after the next two sentences. My agent swears it'll make me more mysterious, more hip, more in your face. I figure anything is worth a shot.

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– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)