I arrived back home safe and well yesterday early yesterday afternoon and it is funny how things have a habit of revisiting you. You might recall that when I flew out I posted about how I helped a young lady who was on the verge of panicking about missing her flight.

Well yesterday I got payback :)

I arrived at the airport in good time to be greeted by a massive queue that even tailed back outside the building. In fact my first view was of the back end of this queue. I asked a lady with a relatively small child if it was the queue for check in and she said yes.

We were chatting for a bit and were soon joined by her partner. I noticed they had very little luggage and I also know from experience with a little one (two in our case) that even going to the park is a major expedition and so I said something and he said something about them having two bags, which were clearly not with them. It was only after being in the queue for 40 minutes when I saw the check in desks and thoughts oops!

So, I had to drop out of the queue and go and check in which took between 5-10 minutes. I then thought I would try to rejoin the queue where i had left it and fortunately I was able to. I surmised that when I left the queue everybody behind me gained a place and when I came back they simply gave it back - the simplest definition of the zero sum concept I can imagine. To not manage would have been to put me back at the back and that 40 minutes of waiting would have become completely pointless and also thrown my timings off to the extent I might have missed my flight.

It was just funny how it came about after what had happened on my outbound flight and it certainly did help me to keep me calm.