My Night (and Day) at the Airport(s)
My hatred of incompetent airlines goes all the way back to a trip Sara and I made to London on Air India. A very long story short, that airline stinks (literally). They take the cake for times when I would rather swim across the ocean than fly. In a very close 2nd place comes our good friends from America, drum roll please… United Airlines. While they appear to have many routes and fairly competitive prices, my experience with them has proven to me that they almost never fly those many convenient routes on time and on occasion they don’t fly at all. Including my flight from Honolulu I have booked with United Airlines for a total of 10 flights. To date, 8 of those 10 flights have been delayed (more than the standard 15 minutes), or canceled or just plain overbooked.
Last night, interrupting my happy hour, I received a call from United Airlines informing me that they made a mistake and don’t have a large enough plane coming into Honolulu. Okay, so here’s the deal they feed me. They’d like me to rebook my flight from Honolulu to fly into Chicago but not until 7:00 AM Friday morning. My original flight was to leave at 9:25 PM Thursday night. In Chicago I would chill at O’hare (goody) for the better portion of 11 hours before flying my ass back across the country to Las Vegas. Eh, sounds pretty crappy but they’re offering me a $600 voucher. Granted that means I would need to fly on United Airlines again, but it is equivalent to roughly 2 round trip tickets. I asked the poor sap working for United if there was a more direct route than back and forth across the continental United States. Amazingly he found a flight from Honolulu to Los Angeles (even better) and then from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Ironically I would end up getting into Las Vegas at the same time but at least I won’t need to pay for internet access and cushy chairs at Los Angeles. I told him I’d accept the $600 voucher and magic was made. I had the brilliant idea to call back and plead to be upgraded to first or business class so I could sleep on the way back but, in the most polite way possible, the agent told me that my cheap ass didn’t pay enough for my original ticket to even consider qualifying for an upgrade – ever. Oh well, I figured I would try to work my way into the Star Class lounge when I get to the airport. If I pitch a fit in person I might get further.
My thought process was that I could either spend another $24 for a room at the hostel and sleep through the night or I could head to the airport and work through the night to get some serious work done. I would then sleep (crammed in economy) on my way to Los Angeles and arrive at LAX completely refreshed. That was a perfect plan except that when I arrived at Honolulu airport the gate keeper told me that I actually wouldn’t be able to check in until 2 hours before my departure. When the hell did they make that rule?! I thought it was always 24 hours. For those of you that weren’t here, I received this cheerful news at about 7:00 PM Thursday night. My new flight didn’t leave until 7:00 AM the next morning so I had a good 10 hours to kill. No problem, they told me that there happens to be a Starbucks here in departures before you even had to get through security. While that is extremely unusual I chalked it up to good luck and ordered the largest coffee they were willing to serve me. I wandered around the Starbucks area of the airport until I found a power outlet and fired up my trusty laptop ready to plow through some work and empty my overdue email inbox. Only problem was that there was no wireless internet. Absolutely nothing. Not even an overpriced network that I could subscribe to.
I decided to handle as many emails as I could anyway and spent the next 4 hours teaching myself the very frustrating card game of hearts. That damn queen of spades is on my list. Along comes a woman who has pretty much done the same thing as I have but with Hawaiian Airlines instead. I guess there’s no real good way to get out of Hawaii. We started chatting and it turns out she’s from Spokane Washington! She didn’t know who Felicia was and she seemed a bit offended when I asked why not. Seriously, I understand the towns not that big and they both went to nursing school. How many women the same age can live in Spokane and go to nursing school without knowing each other? Apparently I managed to run into two of them.
We chatted for a bit and then she brought up the topics of religion and politics. No kidding. I excused myself to find the bathroom and promptly put in my earphones when I came back. She nabbed someone sitting on another bench and I imagine they talked through all the problems of the world together.
This big (not big strong, but big Krispy Kreme) rent-a-cop came up and asked me if I was charging my laptop. “No sir, I just like to plug it into the wall cause it looks cool.” I actually just said “yeah…” and he didn’t stop staring at me. I was a bit confused cause he didn’t say anything else. He just sorta stood there. We had our own little staring contest and then he wandered off to find someone else to bug. The woman I met and the other guy she nabbed were still chatting a mile a minute but I really couldn’t hear anything they were saying as I was jamming to some tunes. I did however hear the big (big as in strong) black man yelling at the top of his voice at them. He had a black book that appeared to be a Bible in one hand and in his other hand his pointer finger was aimed right at the two chatter boxes sitting next to me. I can’t imagine that all these people run around asking each other about their religion so I’m assuming the woman who started it all pulled the pin on this situation. The two of them politely dismissed this large man and he continued to stand there. I thought, what the hell is wrong with these people and staring?! He stood there for a few minutes (literally) waving his book and his pointer finger but didn’t say another word. The two beside me just picked their conversation up like nothing happened. I thought about snapping a picture but then I pictured him snapping me. I could proably draw you a sketch though.
The early morning went on like that until the magic hour of 5:00 AM. Remember that we’re talking about United Airlines here. I went to the ticketing counter and they actually didn’t have a record of me. A few calls to someone with some authority and 30 minutes later I show up in the booking system. Now that we cleared that hurdle all we had to do was figure out how to print the $600 vouchers that I was supposed to receive for chilling overnight at the airport. Another supervisor and 10 minutes later we were good to go.
For how laid back Honolulu is I was a bit amazed at the level of security. Not only did I need to first clear the Department of Agriculture but I was selected for a random bag check immediately after leaving the ticketing counter. Passed that with flying colors and I was on my way to the real TSA screening that we’ll all come to hold close to our hearts. The woman looked and me and brought out the dreaded pink highlighter from her back pocket to put a giant “X” on my boarding pass. I love being picked out of a crowd. Unfortunately that big pink “X” didn’t exclude me from security checks. It meant that after I did the normal unpack your bags and send them through the x-ray machine you need to step off to the little room on the right so we can make sure you haven’t recently been dealing coke or making bombs. Okay, not like I had much choice. I made it through the metal detector without incident but the guy running the x-ray didn’t like my bags. They never really give you a good reason. I think they just like to see the bright colors slide back and forth and flip from one to another as they pretend to examine my bags. He pulled them off and said they would need to take a look. Conveniently enough for me, I was already scheduled to be examined so we could kill two birds with one stone here. Into the little room and they start rifling through my only two bags while another officers pats me down. They asked for my wallet and told me to keep an eye on them as they pulled each of my credit cards and tested the edges of them for traces of cocaine. After that it was time for the bomb test. They took little white cotton discs and swabbed every inch of my bags they could find. Those cotton discs were tested. Whew! Came out clean. Not over yet though. Apparently anything I have with an on/off switch needed to be examined. That would include things like: my phone, iPod, camera, laptop, beard trimmer, etc. You see how this process could go on and one. They looked pleasantly surprised when I cleared all their tests and I was free to go.
Awesome – finally on my way. Or at least I thought so. I don’t have anything against most Asian’s at airports except that they always seem to think the plane is going to leave without them. Maybe it’s common practice on China Airlines but here in America we save you a seat. It’s the little number printed on your ticket. They swarm the boarding gate before the boarding even begins. They ignore the cranky gate attendant who continuously tells them that she is boarding seating area number 2 and that they are in number 5. It appears that they believe that just means they should go to the end of the line. Amazingly enough, it’s still the same situation when they get back to the front of the line except that the gate attendant gets a bit more cranky and still sends them away. While it’s entertaining to watch it causes serious delays due to the sheer numbers these groups travel in. They must get bulk discounts if they purchase an entire cabin class.
Touching down in Los Angeles always sends a chill up my spine. It’s better than O’hare but not by much. I made my over over to my new gate as my next plane departs in 20 minutes. Can’t be late! Of course the next flight is delayed. It’s only an hour, not the end of the world and I half expected it with United Airlines. After 2 more delays for the same flight they moved the gate. It sounds like they finally had a plane for us! Woohoo! (I was only supposed to be in Las Vegas 8 hours ago at this point.) The cranky gate attendant made the famous announcement that they overbooked the plane and would be happy to rebook 6 passengers to a later flight (3 hours) with a voucher for a free flight anywhere in the continental United States. How could I pass this one up? Hell, I could just live at the airport and collect free flights.
Now I’m chilling here waiting for my next flight which is currently on time but will probably end up a tad late. After all, there’s no sense in breaking tradition at United Airlines. Hell, maybe I’ll get bumped to first class.
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