When I was a kid, I loved to play The Oregon Trail.

No matter how many times I was informed I had died of dysentery, I kept playing. If you select option 3, you’ll see I still hold the top score of 7,803 in an online emulator.

The premise was simple: Survive a multi month cross country trip without dying. You could play as either a hardscrabble farmer, an industrious carpenter, or a well heeled banker. The more challenging your starting circumstances, the higher your ending score. The entire game was a historical sociology lesson disguised as entertainment.

Brilliant.

Today though, I feel like 95% of the traveling public would probably die of dehydration before departing the general store with their clothing, axles and wagon wheels. It amazes me how little discomfort people will tolerate anymore.

As we were heading home from Dallas yesterday, we boarded the plane, settled in and waited for takeoff. However, our departure time came and went and we never pushed back. The pilot soon informed us there was “a problem and maintenance was on the way”. While not ideal, I had a book and kept reading.

About an hour later, amid a cacophony of grumbling, griping and gnashing of teeth, it was announced maintenance would have to remove an entire side panel of the plane to fix the issue, so they were grounding it and we would be deplaning and reloading onto another plane a few gates down. Ultimately, the whole experience was a minor inconvenience; no different than having a layover before catching a connection.

Making up time in the air, our total arrival delay was only 90 minutes. I would have given it no further thought had I not overheard a woman in baggage claim in Savannah talking to the man who arrived to pick her up. She was telling him the reason we were delayed is the people in the 2 rows in front of her had no air conditioning blowing at their seats!

So even though every other row in the plane had functional air conditioning, meaning once we pressurized at altitude everyone would have been plenty cool at 29,000 feet, we were all delayed and re-routed because a handful of people couldn’t keep cool for a few minutes.

They would have died of frailty on the trail.

— The Impostor