Trite Airport Nightmare Volume Eleventy-Four Thousand and Two
(This is part two of a saga that started here in part one.)
So where did I leave you? Oh yeah. I was waiting for a 3:40 flight. We didn’t make it. We went off to spend the last $14 in the monumental $28 that they gave us for the day in the airport to kill enough time to bridge until the 6:30 PM flight which was already delayed until 7:19 PM.
They started boarding the 6:30 PM 7:19 PM flight and it appeared that all hope was lost. They called a few names and let some people on, when the desk guy who proclaimed “all stand-by’s have been cleared for the flight.” I didn’t understand and assumed this meant that there were no seats left and as Jen and I got up, I was all upset. She walked to the ticket lady and basically told me that that meant we could go get on the flight.
Jen, understanding the greek lingo of the dummies who work for Delta walks us up to the ticket scanner lady. We handed our tickets to the ticket lady as precious time was expiring and she scanned our standby tickets only to tell us that we hadn’t been cleared for the flight.
To the ticket counter where a large black man with the vocal inflection of a black woman saying “OH NO YOU DIDN’T” was waiting to “help” us. He told us that he didn’t have us on his standby list. I told him that they had told us that we would automatically be rolled over to each standby after each flight. He basically told me that I was stupid, and wrong and that I should have checked into the desk with him sometime earlier in the day. Nice to know that I was misled by one of his coworkers and he had no problem taking their error out on the customer.
After fiddling with the computer, he looked at us and said, “I don’t have time for all this.” He yelled across to the ticket lady and told us to just go ahead. He said, “Hey let these two go on the plane.”
We walked through toward the ticket scanning lady and as we did so, we passed three passengers who were supposed to be on the plane, but had gotten bumped off of it because they hadn’t made it to the gate in time. In essence, we were taking their seats.
As the effeminate attitudinal man yelled “Let those people go” the three late passengers told the ticket lady that that meant THEY could go. I interrupted and told them no no no, the man was talking about me and my wife and we walked out to the plane.
CONFUSED YET? This is RIDICULOUS!
So Jen and I walk to the plane and as we are getting there, the three passengers who had been late are now following us to the plane. Jen and I get up to the entrance and the attendant tells us to go ahead and sit wherever there is an open seat. Keep in mind that we didn’t have seating assignments for the flight. Hell we didn’t even have boarding passes at all for this particular flight that we were now walking into. Now it is a game of musical chairs. Make sure you have a seat when the music stops. Jen is first onto the plane. I am right behind her. She passes the first row, where there is an open seat. I have a flash of strategery and figure that I better take that open seat, and Jen is first in line, so she will definitely get some kind of seat back there.
I was in some kind of “Get me the fuck out of Atlanta” kind of mental zone at this point.
The plan worked perfectly. I was seated in the first row and Jen was sitting somewhere behind me, probably about ten rows back. Now there are the three folks walking into the plane behind us and they want to kill the mother-effers who just took their seats on the plane.
It turns out that there are two seats left and this is a group of three people who traveled together. A nice man decides to volunteer his seat to let them all on the flight and he walks off the plane. So now we have a situation where Jen and I are sitting on this plane with a bunch of people who hate us. Hell, if I were them I would hate us too.
Then the Delta employees failed to understand that this guy volunteered to get off of the plane and another employee walks onto the plane and makes an announcement that they want Jen to come up front. I was sitting in the front seat and proclaimed that she is my wife and if you take her off, you are going to waste a seat on the flight and that the other dude volunteered to get off of the plane. This finally seems good enough for the Delta employees and Jen and I fly back to Akron Canton at 7:19 PM, more than 8 hours after our originally scheduled flight was supposed to leave.
There was no incident on the plane, but talk about potential tension between customers. Delta did their share to make sure that a potential powder keg was on board that day. On top of that, I was a little bit upset that we had been sent onto a flight without being properly assigned to seats in the fancy flight computer system. All I could think of as we took off was that if something had happened to that flight, it might have taken them days to deduce the fact that we were on that flight and not the one leaving at 9:40 PM that we had assigned seats for.
To top off the whole miserable experience, our baggage was locked away in a Delta baggage room that had no attendant at the Akron Canton airport. We had to wait for someone to come back after loading up the carousel with all the bags from the flight we had just arrived on. It turns out that they keep the staffing really low at Akron Canton and most people multi-task to the nth degree. So the baggage handlers also handle the baggage offices. They handle the loading and unloading of the plane including the ticket taking. They shuttle planes around on the runway. Any one employee can do any of those tasks.
I guess I don’t have a problem with that until they are so understaffed that I can’t get access to some bags that arrived about 6 hours before I was lucky enough to get there.
Some final thoughts.
Eff Delta. I will go out of my way to NEVER EVER fly with them again. I refuse so much so that when Jen suggested I take out some of my rage on their customer service people to try and get us some vouchers, I said no. Why? Because I don’t care how much money they give me. I am not going to fly anywhere with them ever again. They screwed us out of our original flight. They offered us a single ticket when we were clearly traveling together. They only gave us $28 for the two of us to eat two meals in the airport. Their potential solution was a 10 hour delay. On top of all that, there planes feel old. Eff Delta.
Eff Akron Canton airport. I wanted to like my experience there. I wanted it to be a nice cheap alternative to Hopkins international. For my troubles I get bad service, a wacked out shuttle driver from the parking lot, horrible security gates, uncomfortable terminals, and finally, multi-tasking knuckle-draggers who aren’t particularly good at any one thing, especially customer service.
Eff Atlanta airport. The food is too expensive. There are far too many people there. They charge for wireless internet access. They didn’t have a store that carried an iPod data cable. They change gates every five minutes for every flight. Eff them hard.
Really, though, I had a nice time on vacation. It was just the travel day that sucked. Thanks to my wife for putting up with me on what could have been one of the most miserable days of my life.
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