how … how bad is your
regular life, that you think …
know what would be fun?
“As far as wanting to go places, I can’t believe people do it for fun. When I’m in airports, and I see people going on vacations, I think, ‘How horrible could your life be? How bad is your regular life, that you think, you know what would be fun? Let’s get the kids, go to the airport, with thousands of pieces of luggage, stand in these lines, be yelled at by a bunch of morons, leave late, be squished all together—and this is better than our actual life.”
Fran Lebowitz in Netflix’s ‘Pretend It’s a City’.
My wife wanted to fly from South Carolina to Michigan.
She booked a flight that left on Monday at 10am and she would arrive around 4pm.
Then there was a software glitch and her airline couldn’t schedule a flight crew and they cancelled all their flights on Monday.
She booked a new flight on a new airline for Tuesday.
She would take off again around 11am, layover in Charlotte, NC, for 90 minutes and take off and arrive at 4pm.
I dropped her off and wasn’t more than 5 minutes into my drive to work when she called that her flight was delayed by one hour due to crew scheduling.
This reduced her layover time in Charlotte to 30 minutes.
I checked the Airport map and her arrival gate was in a terminal that at least was next to the terminal where the departure gate was.
She talked to the Airline people and they were confident she would make the connection.
From my desk I watched airplane arrival and departure times.
When the plane did leave it looked like she would have a somewhat doable 35 minutes to make her next flight.
The next text I got, she had landed in Charlotte during a lightning storm and since no ground crews could be out on the tarmac, no one was allowed to get off the plane.
Not to worry said, the pilot, no planes could take off either.
From the map, my wife’s current plane and the connecting plane were butt to butt but stuck there with her waiting to get off and the other plane, full of people, waiting to take off.
The airport cleared the Ground Stop when the storm blew over and she raced to the next gate.
The gate was closed.
If that wasn’t bad enough, someone from the airline came along with two other passengers and let them board the flight.
Somehow they had been added to the manifest for the flight but my wife and another passenger where rejected as the flight plan had been filed with the existing passenger list.
Someone needs to explain to me how this works.
So my wife got another flight to Chicago that would connect with another flight.
She should arrive around 11pm with long waits in Charlotte and Chicago.
Finally getting on the plane to Chicago, another storm hits the windy city.
She lands there late.
No worries as O’Hare is also being delayed by the storm and who knows what else.
Her departure was set to 11:30pm.
Then we realized that was Central Time.
What ELSE could happen.
Then another passenger looks at my wife and says, ‘I hope this crew doesn’t time out …‘
But the crew didn’t time out and the last text I got was at 1:44am Wednesday Morning.
‘Landed‘ it said.
She should have been there around 4pm on Monday.
Just starting with her take off time on Tuesday, we could have driven there faster.
I am reminded of the time my Wife and I toured the Wright Brothers Cycle Factory in Greenfield Village in Detroit.
The docent gave us a sketch of the lives of the Wright’s and how they sold bikes during the day and worked on their airplane at night.
I asked, “Was it true that they custom designed their engine and that on the morning of that first flight, it took them a couple of hours to get the engine started and running correctly?“
The docent said that yes, that was true.
“So,” I said, “The Wright Brothers invented flight delay before they invented flight?“
We need that on a postage stamp.
No Haiku For You 