June 10, 2003
So, how the hell did you spend your Thursday?
If you answered "stuck in a frigging airplane in the middle of Texas," then your day was similar to mine.
Thursday was when I was on my way to Pittsburgh with a co-worker and friend, Jill. We were heading to the annual convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, a trade group made up of (surprise!) alternative weekly newspapers and the liberal writers and businesspeople (along with a handful of scattered, confused, stunned conservatives) that make them up. The plan was simple: We were to leave at 8 a.m. on a 2 1/2-hour flight to Houston, to be followed by a 45-minute layover, a 2 1/2-hour flight to Pittsburgh, and several days of seminars and binge drinking.
It started off swimmingly. The plane -- I won't name the airline we were flying; we'll just refer to them as "Scontinental" -- took off on time, and we were on our merry little way.
The first hint of trouble came when the pilot mentioned that the weather in Houston was a bit stormy. But we shrugged; planes fly during storms all the time. Right?
Slowly, the captain's updates got progressively icky. First, we had to slow down because of thunderstorms in the area. Then, we had to circle a bit. Then -- surprise! -- the captain said we woulld be able to make it OK. Then, without warning, he told us that we would NOT be able to make it OK, and that we had to land in Austin instead.
Crap. It looked like we would be missing our connecting flight. But at least we'd be able to get off the plane in Austin and stretch, right?
If you answered "right" then you are an ignorant dweeb.
We landed -- along with half of the rest of the Scontinental fleet -- and they opened the door. But they wouldn't let ANYBODY off (save a few stunningly lucky folks who had intended to get to Austin through Houston).
The pilot assured us the delay would be brief. At one point, he gave an approximate take-off time a half-hour away. He did the same thing a half-hour later. Then, in a sign that all we trapped travelers took as NOT GOOD, they decided to put a movie on.
After about 2 1/2 hours at the scenic Austin airport, we took off, landing in Houston 40 minutes later.
Then it got REALLY interesting.
We got off the plane and walked in to what would be best described as travelers' hell. You see, basically every flight in and out of Houston had been royally messed up, meaning the entire airport was teeming with cranky, frustrated travelers.
A Scontinental employee told us to go to the gate where the next flight to Pittsburgh would be taking off from -- three hours later. We went there, and an attendant told us we needed to go to the customer service center instead. We headed to the customer service center, where a woman came out and told us to go back to the gate. When Jill politely informed the woman that we had just been told at the gate to come here, the woman not-so-politely told us that we should go back to the gate if we ever wanted to see Pittsburgh.
THIS was not good.
We trudged back to the gate, crankier than ever, and told the woman there that we had been sent back to her. She begrudgingly took our tickets and started typing at the computer.
I decided, being a professional wiseass and all, to start up a witty and tension-cutting conversation.
"One heck of a thunderstorm," I said, earning top honors for Lamest Conversation Starter Line that day.
The woman smiled and said, I kid you not: "Yeah, and honestly, I am glad it happened. It’s been dry for months, and we really needed the rain."
I did NOT, despite what my natural instincts told me to do, leap across the counter and throttle her until her face turned a festive shade of purple. I managed to bite my tongue as she typed away on the computer.
After she gave tickets to Jill and I for the flight that would ultimately get us into Pittsburgh seven hours later than originally planned, we headed to the bar in the concourse. We still had almost three hours to kill. The binge drinking was going to start early.
Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan in exile in Arizona. Jimmy's column appears here Tuesdays, and a column archive may be viewed at www.jimmyboegle.com.