Have a seat. You're going to be here a good long while.
Yeah.
So, Tom was going to visit his mother this weeks. We were able to find a reasonably priced flight out of the local airport that should have gotten him there about 5:30.
HA.
We arrived at noon, in plenty of time to make the flight. Checked in, fixed the wonky boarding passes, and headed down the terminal. As we sat down to wait for him to head through security, we get travel alerts from Orbitz, telling us that the flight is being delayed. Well, that's not so bad, but we didn't hear it from the airline. Tom proceeded to the gate as though everything were going on time. I headed back home, with a little planned detour to the store.
I'm half way through the store, and the phone rings. Guess who. Guess what. The flight was cancelled. Cancelled. Grr arg.
Tom gets online and they get him on the next flight that leaves at 3:10. Well, he was told off the bat that they were running late. Okfine. He would still make the connecting flight. Okfine.
He gets on the plane, he gets off the plane. He gets on the plane, and they tell them that anyone who has a connecting flight before 8:30 has to debark the plane. The plane has lost use of it's radar and they were going to some rinky dink backwater (as if we should talk) airport to get a new one and there was no way they were going to be at Philly before then. Fantastic.
He calls me about 4:30 and tells me what's going on. They are going to rebook him, AGAIN, on another flight. I tell him to call me when he knows what's going on. So I wait. And wait. And Wait. And wait.
Finally about 6:15 he calls and tells me that he's still standing on line. I just about lose it on the phone and tell him I'll be there in 10 minutes. I drive like the dickens to the airport and find him online, and there's a very long line. He's near the front, so clearly my original plan of going on in there a b*tch on wheels wasn't going to work. I tried a different approach: I called the airline.
They hung up on me.
I called Orbitz.
They hung up on me.
I called them back.
They transferred me to the airline.
Who proceeded to hang up on me.
Honestly, I was ready to punch something. Finally, the jerk who had been at the counter for nearly an hour (according to the others in line and who were ready to snap his blackberry in half) got whatever the heck it was he wanted and went away. Then, the two Israeli gentlemen who missed their connecting flight to LaGuardia were up next. Then the woman with the aircast who would have taken a flight to Timbuktu to get out of the airport was up next. And finally Tom.
"We can get you on the 8:25."
You bet your ass you can get him on that flight. Because if you can't you're booking him on the 8:35 out of the other airport and I'm going drive his butt down there.
So, he gets the third set of boarding passes for the day. We walk back to the waiting area and Tom endulges in a soda and a pack of Nutter Butters. Oh yeah. Healthy diet. So we sit for a while and he decides that he has to go through security again and he should get going. This time, I am not leaving until the plane is off the ground.
He heads down the walkway, through security (he should have worn socks) out into the 10 gates they have there. I head over to rental car area where there are some chairs that you can sit in and watch the planes take off. I settle in and not 10 minutes later, I get a phone call from you-know-who, and … well go ahead. Guess.
That’s right, there’s a delay. Now they aren’t taking off until 9:45. I can’t sit there that long—I have to go to work the next morning. Reluctantly, I got out of the chair and headed for the car. Just about the time I got to the gate with the car, the phone rang again. I dreaded answering it.
This time, though, the news wasn’t bad. They were moving up the departure time to 8:45, and that they would be boarding soon. Apparently they were board in minutes after he hung up with me, because the plane was listed as departing at 8:33 p.m.
So, just 12 hours after he left our house, he finally landed in Binghamton.
He could have driven there, and been there four hours before.
Gah.
No comments:
Post a Comment