What IS the worst thing that can happen on day 1 of a 4 day?

How about your suitcase can break and the zipper can decide it would like to no longer function?

So I came home from my very last trip as a fancy line holder - I had Frankfurt over New Years. I was on crew rest when the ball dropped in NYC, and we were still in the terminal when everyone was wishing each other a Frohes Neues Jahr in Deutschland. I landed Saturday and spent the rest of the night in my sweats, looking at a list of 25 open nta pairings thinking I was heading to Europe Sunday night. Wrong. I came downstairs at 9:30 and was enjoying my oatmeal, getting ready to start a cup of coffee when my phone rang - scheduling. Whah whah. I had a domestic (DOMESTIC???!!!) 3 day, 30 hours in Raleigh Durham that checked in in exactly three hours, leaving me 45 minutes to shower, blow out my hair, get dressed, packed and out the door. I didn't even bother to put my face on until 5 that night!

My first leg was deadhead to IAH, middle seat row 34. Awesome. I couldn't even pretend it was crew rest and take a nap! I ended up watching Love Happens and honestly, I wasn't impressed. There were two episodes of Big Bang Theory, and that made me happy. My fellow nta reserve and I had dinner in the crew caf, and eventually made our way to the gate. We get on the plane and right before boarding, she realizes that her suitcase won't zip back up. The zipper had completely dislodged from the zipping track and as we all know, suitcases are nothing like a jacket when you can go back to the bottom and start again. What to do??? So we grabbed a few seat belt extensions (obesity in America, it's an issue especially in a place like Texas... where everything really IS bigger!!) and secured them around the width using the handles. Luckily fellow reserve had a nice long black scarf/wrap and used that to seal the top and bottom closed. Had this been my roller, I would have been screwed because there's no handle on the bottom of my Travel Pro, that I've had since training. We made it to the hotel unscathed and off to the mall the next day. She bought a new roller; crisis averted. She said this was her third roller since she started flying; I'm getting ready to purchase a new tote and that will be my third tote bag. I'm thinking I can hold out till the summer when we really start flying again.

I got back to my domicile around 1:30 on day 3 and headed to my Grandmother's house unannounced. That's what happens when you give someone the key. She's not really doing better yet, and has another doctors appointment on the 12th. Talk about a Frohes Neues Jahr.