The cable news this morning is all snow apolocalypse, mainly breathless reports of how badly DC got hit, with occasional mention that Baltimore was actually hit worse. Conditions here seem fairly stable. The airport is running again apparently, but a lot of flights are still canceled. I'm keeping hope alive that I'll get out tomorrow morning. The hotel is fairly deserted except for cleaning staff, one of whom is an older lady that chats me up as I pass in the halls in a rambling manner that suggests a sort of desperation for an audience. After our exchange I pass an younger cleaning lady who pokes her head from the room she's working on to exclaim "She'll talk your head off if you let her!" in a tone more exasperated than accepting.
I talk to the employee at the desk who checked me in last afternoon to let her know that I'll be staying another day. I mean to ask if my rate will change, but I'm distracted by a girl sitting in the lobby with luggage who overhears our exchange and tells me that I should call Delta about getting a lodging voucher, stating that they'd given her one. I put off reupping with the clerk to return to my room and call several Delta numbers and the airport, which has no live human operators, just a recorded message about conditions. As I'm put on hold for a Delta representative, The Clientele's 2005 song "(I Can't Seem To) Make You Mine" plays over the line, interrupted roughly every 30 seconds by a recorded message telling me about the great things Delta offers. For some reason or another, hearing that song as hold-time Muzak strikes me as being incredibly bizarre and a sense of unreality sets in until the song ends and is replaced by some strummy tune I don't recognize.
The Delta rep tells me that the company doesn't offer lodging reimbursement for cancellations due to weather, and besides doesn't arrange anything like that over the phone; all vouchers must be handled in person through a Delta employee at the airport. I choose to interpret this bit of double-speak as indication that I'm on my own rather than as a dare to hike out to the airport to argue with Delta in person. I relay this information to the lady at the counter when I return to. She encourages me to keep calling to try and arrange something. Feeling resigned, don't even ask her about the rate, despite the fact that I had promised myself I would this morning shortly after awakening. Despite my objective knowlege that the amount of money I'm already committing to interview travel over the next couple weeks is going to be a debt burden that I will almost certainly shoulder for several years hence, I'm at the point where what I'll pay for this hotel stay almost feels irrelevant to me. Whether this is due to my mental state, a conditioned vestige of the credit-based economy, or some unholy union of the two, nobody can say.
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