“That flight’s been canceled.”

“What do you mean canceled? The information monitor lists it as on schedule,” I was not happy. A long and difficult work week away from home and family had finally ended with this fresh obstacle facing us. I was unhappy but my business colleague was steamed! Faced with imperious indifference he blew his top as he not too gently informed the airline employee that his response was not acceptable.

Thus began what turned out to be another in a continuing string of air adventures that seemed to plague us. With the temperature touching 100 degrees and the humidity in Houston tacking close behind we were hot, sweaty, tired and irritable. That is, situation normal for a couple of Seattleites traveling outside their comfort zones.

And we had good reasons to be upset. It was the end of a prolonged business trip and we’d checked out of our motel, turned in our car, spent our traveling money and had nowhere else to go. We needed to get home. In fact we’d made an extra effort to get to the airport early so that if there were any problems we could make alternate arrangements.

Back in those days flying generally as less stressful than today. Little security and less crowded flights made for relatively rapid boarding and departures so often you only needed to arrive at the airport just a few minutes early in order to catch a flight. As experienced travelers we could just about judge how close to cut it and still comfortably catch our flight but this was a special case so we departed from our normal practice and deliberately arrived about 2 hours early. After the week we’d experienced we wanted nothing to delay our departure and certainly we didn’t want to be stranded in an airport.

Checking the information monitor as we walked into the airport we relaxed as it listed our flight as on time and on schedule. This gave us plenty of time to eat and then mosey out to the departure gate. Our first inkling of something wrong was the absence of a line at the gate’s departure counter. In fact the gate was unmanned! This was a bit disconcerting then things got worse.

Fortunately someone from the airline came to the counter to pick up some material for another flight and we braced him on where we boarded our flight (we just assumed that the departure gate had been changed as frequently happens). That’s when we were informed of the cancellation. What made it so frustrating is that if we’d know about the cancellation earlier there were alternate flights on other airlines we could have used. Now we were seemingly stuck except my companion wouldn’t accept the situation.

Insisting on talking with someone in authority we got passed to a supervisor who initially basically told us “tough luck”, it’s not the airlines fault until we pointed out that thew monitor still listed our flight as on time. He then began to backtrack as more passengers arrived to complain. Interestingly we weren’t the first to complain. Then he offered to put us on an alternate that would get us “close” to Seattle but we’d have to catch a “limo” to Houston International airport (we at the Houston Hobby airport which was clear across town because we were leaving from NASA).

Pages:
1 2 3 next page »»

Tags: airline, Humor, travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

this article with others.