Unmeaning Flattery
www.UnmeaningFlattery.com

Home | Blog | Search | RSS | Contact

Better to Walk?

Monday 03/05/2007 8:12 AM

Glad to be back home. Had a great time with Alex, friends in Atlanta, etc. WolfMother rocked. Saw snow!

Anyway...

Saturday night U.S. Airways upgraded their computer systems in Columbus, Ohio. Come Sunday morning the computers didn't work until 6:30 AM. So anyone that got to the airport at 5AM had to wait an hour-and-a-half to check-in. I got there at about 7:20 for a 9:11 flight. The line went for days and the no-baggage-to-check-quick-grab-your-boarding-pass-and-run kiosks were down as well. Oh, and, by the way, Columbus is apparently a U.S. Airways hub.

Finally got my boarding pass, made it through security and found my gate. It was one of those three gates (22, 24, 26) in one deals. There was a line at the gate desk because the DC flight going out one of those gates had been cancelled. Problem was, though, the computers at the gate were down. I amused myself for a few minutes by eavesdropping on the gate agent talking on the phone to U.S. Airways tech support. Have no idea how that all ever worked out. The same people were still in line when I boarded.

I was the first on the plane in my zone and I found my seat and proceeded to slowly pass out after three nights of about 4 hours of sleep each. Turns out there was a new problem to contend with: Two other people had been issued boarding passes with my seat. That's right: U.S. Airways issued three boarding passes to the same seat.

I got it first and they were gonna have to call security to make me move and even then I was gonna scream assault, but fortunately it never came to that. They got the overbooked seat situation squared just as the announced the flight was overbooked and they wanted people to volunteer for bumping.

After that, it was time to de-ice the plane!

We finally got into the air almost an hour behind schedule, but it looked like the pilot made up some time by pressing that secret button all commercial planes have that allows them to bend space and time (how else could they make up time in the air?).

Then came Filthydelphia (as Candy likes to call it).

Turns out that Delta has its own terminal in the City of Brotherly Love (not gonna touch that one). And — get this — it has a separate security check-in that is so well planned out that if you come in on a non-Delta flight, you get to be scanned and probed all over again! Woohoo!

The requisite scanning and probing kept me from getting a snack, so I didn't get my traditional travel meal (hot dog and a Kahlua & cream) until Atlanta in the middle of the afternoon.

I finally made it home, though, and pretty much on time. Now it's time to go to work.

Much more on the trip later.

File Under: Travel
Music: Nine Inch Nails "Year Zero"

Permalink | Comments | Trackback

Previous Entry | Next Entry


©1969-2024 Peter Stuart Lakanen. All rights reserved.
Please report problems to webmaster.