Dateline: November 23. I'm at the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) trying to check in. Traffic on US-27 has made me more behind schedule than I would like to be. My flight leaves at 7:20; I'm getting to the ticket counter at 6:40, barely in time for the thirty-minute cutoff for checked luggage.

At the self check-in for Delta Airlines, you can swipe a credit card, scan the barcode on your printout, or type in your reservation number in order to check in. First, I swiped my credit card (it grabs your name from the credit card in order to identify you). Then, I told the computer where I was going. After that, I told the computer when I was departing. All of this served to help it find my reservation. I waited while the computer thought all of these facts over. Eventually, it came to the conclusion that I wasn't a real person. I was faced with a blank screen and an "Exit" button. In my years of flying I've never seen such a thing. Maybe the kiosk was bad, I said to myself, fully understanding that the kiosk was just a mindless terminal connected to a server somewhere (but in the face of danger, we think the most irrational things).

So I went to another kiosk. Same thing. I tried the barcode. Same thing. Finally I called over a Friendly Associate to help me out. "I've seen this screen a few times before," she said. "Have you tried your confirmation number?" Of course! The confirmation number! I punched it in ... to no avail. So the nice lady (and she was really a wonderfully helpful lady) took me to a real terminal and helped me out.

Interesting thing number one: my flight had been moved from 7:20 to 9:05. Originally, I was going to travel "non-stop" to Denver, which means there's a stop, and in Atlanta of all places. That's exactly the opposite direction! (Was it Douglas Adams who said that Atlanta was the hub for all traffic throughout the galaxy?) This new flight bypassed Atlanta, where there was apparently bad weather. It was a "direct" flight to Denver (meaning no stops on the way). Perhaps, I thought, the airline was re-booking people who couldn't make it to Atlanta. Okay, fine.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Apparently I still couldn't be booked. She handed me over to someone else who looked at my reservation and my ID and made a call on a red telephone. He waited for a long time to talk to a woman and then gave her my information: my birth date and initials. Then he hung up and everything was fine. "So, what happened?" I asked.

"Apparently your name was on a watchlist," he said.

A watchlist! A watchlist! What kind of terrorist is named "Mark Wilson"? That's like putting out an APB for everyone named "John Smith"! I've read a lot about watchlists and people being denied access to a flight because they happened to have the same common name as someone else. But now it's happened to me. That's so cool! Fortunately, in this case, the problem was easily fixable and I didn't have to argue (which brings me to another point: don't argue with or be nasty to the airline representatives. They didn't put you on the list, but they can help you get off of it -- but they'll be less inclined to do so if you're mean to them).

Thankfully, my later flight allowed me to read 1984 at the bar at Outback Steakhouse while enjoying a mug of Sam Adams. I've never had a drink in an airport bar before. It's fun! I highly recommend it to anyone, except terrorists. Terrorists named John Smith.