I routinely travel long distances for my work. This typically involves a ride on an airplane and the concomitant long lines waiting for services that seem inefficient and unnecessary. The delays, the small but important details of gates and boarding passes and acceptable identification; the subliminal anxiety behind ground travel in shuttle buses and taxis; the moment of panic when they can’t find your name on the reservation list at the hotel lobby: all of these things contribute to a generalized disorientation and fatigue.

Which is why airport lobbies are so disappointing. The weary traveler looks forward to them as refuges, as places of predictably expensive yet decent food, as niches for finding news, for napping, for catching up on the inevitably delayed tasks of business traveling. The airport lobby is the hoped-for oasis, the place to make phone calls, to check email, to catch up on all the forum messages posted by creative writing students.

But the chairs in airport lobbies seem deliberately shaped to obviate comfort. The meals are often stale or tasteless. The television monitors are usually tuned to the wrong stations. And the Internet access — which costs about ten bucks an hour — is always filtered through a proxy server which prevents the user from accessing preferred sites.

Consider the example of Toronto. I arrive four hours before my flight with the express purpose of devoting that time to forum responses. I want to make sure that I have reflected on, and made suggestions to, the sentence submissions of every student in my creative writing class. I dutifully enter my credit card number into the wifi access form, fill out the improbably large array of personal details, create a temporary service account, and log on. The welcome screen assures me that I can go anywhere I want online. So far so good. But, of course, I soon discover that the system prevents secure connections. The online creative writing course is, naturally, a secure (https) connection.

I recognize, with mounting anger and anxiety (in that order) that I will not be able to submit my intended responses, that I will be inert, stuck, boondoggled, as I have been so many other times, by the senseless indifference on the airport lobby. The place is a miasma of hurdles, blockages, dead ends.

And I realize that tomorrow, when finally I make it back home, when the sundry commitments of the busiest week of the season grab hold of my energies and shake them into submission, then I will have to catch up, to explain to my students what has happened, to try to shoehorn my responses between other commitments stacked together like cordwood.

I try to relax, to go with the flow — don’t push the river, as they say. It will all work out. No worries. I settle back into the chair. But the back of the chair seems designed to dig into my shoulder, and the noise from the intercom overhead is jangly and strident, and the turkey sandwich I ate is waking up again inside my stomach. And I remember, after all, that I am in an airport lobby. And in those places, the oasis is a dry well.