FAAck you, peasant. Best I can tell, the disaster started early last week, grew much worse Thursday, and rapidly accelerated early Friday, at which point the Mid-Atlantic airports collapsed into chaos — an infrastructural disaster that extended through the weekend, was then exacerbated by storms across the country, and somehow never cracked the news. I wouldn’t know about it myself had so many people close to me not been traveling, and were I not that annoying person in every friend group who lives on the internet, and is therefore bombarded with questions whenever something strange is happening. “Michael, pull it up,” my mom has said to me for several decades. But beyond corroborating the fact that something had indeed gone catastrophically wrong after skimming a handful of flight trackers, I had nothing to report. Not even our citizen journalists were on the case, a silence that became, for me, the most unnerving aspect of the weekend, as broad public disinterest in the story wildly contrasted with what I heard from the ground.

Friday morning, a friend of mine successfully took off on a flight from Miami to Newark after a miserable three-hour delay, and whatever. We expect this now. But then his plane was instructed to circle Washington for two hours — with “fifty other planes in a similar position,” his pilot informed the cabin — before finally diverting to Reagan Airport, three hours south of New York City by train. From there, flights to the city were unavailable. Meanwhile, another friend of mine was stranded in Nashville after his flight to the city was cancelled. With no reliable flight back for days, and no hotels available, he rented a car (one of the last remaining) and drove. “I’ve been waiting here for six hours,” my mom texted Friday night. She was leaving Tampa for Atlantic City after visiting my sister. It was already 11PM, and there were no available flights home for six days (partially, I concede, this is on her for flying Spirit).