Something else came up while I was still in the Corpus Christi Airport after I had packed away the laptop. I was sitting there reading a book occasionally checking the time since it was getting fairly close to the time that I would be expecting to start the boarding process.

All of a sudden the fire alarms started flashing and the annoying noise starts up. A voice comes over the intercom saying, "Do not panic, but a fire has been spotted on your level. Please make your way calmly to the exits."

This does not sit well with me. I've already gone through "special handling" with security once and I can easily envision the mess that there will be when they finally decide to let people back in and the throngs of people have to wait oh so patiently with overworked security staff while my flight leaves without me. This is definitely not an acceptable possibilty to me.

I look around the fairly open and spacious concourse and think about the fact that I don't see any fire and since its so open that as soon as I did I would have plenty of time to make my exit at such a time.

There were a number of other people waiting in my gate area that seemed to be having similar rebellious thoughts as I was having. As I watched all of the people from other gates as well as most of those from ours walking towards the exit area with our belongings several people were muttering about the pattern of "adventures" they've had every time they've flown out of this particular airport and that they really didn't want to go through it again.

I kept an eye on the airport employee working our gate and had decided that if he seems to be heading off to the exits then I would give serious thought about following, but he didn't seem in any real hurry to do so. A few moments later the gate attendant indicates to us that we can go ahead and start boarding and that he won't go through the whole boarding procedure of boarding by zones.

*grin* I was the third person to board.

And all of the people who followed the instructions of the disembodied voice barely managed to get on the plane before take off, since according to the flight attendant that by airline regulations that the plane would not have ben able to wait just because of the fire alarm.