How do you spell 'tornadoe'?
Alright, 9 hours after leaving this morning we have succeeded in making it... back to our apartment. Rebkos, I blame this one entirely on you. Apparently you coughed some of that bad aviation karma onto us.
There were thunderstorms and tornados around Dallas today. We were supposed to fly into Dallas this morning.
So, we took the SamTrans bus to the airport and everything went very smoothly. We made it to the bus station exactly at 6:15, got to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Checked in our bag, went to the gate. Flight was scheduled to depart on time. Then about 15 minutes before boarding things began to go wrong. There were three flights going from SFO to DFW at precisely 9:25 today. We were on one of them. Guess which one got delayed by an hour? Well, that didn't actually matter -- we weren't in a particular hurry today. But then, guess whose flight got cancelled? Ours, of course, at least at first. That's when we first started hearing things about there being tornados in Dallas and over 300 flights getting grounded. Of course, at that point we got up to go stand in line at the check-in desk to try to see how we could reschedule or reroute or something. We were supposed to give a presentation at UT Tyler tomorrow at noon, so we wanted to get there before then.
Of course, after they announced the cancellation there was a whole plane-full of people waiting in line at the check-in desk to reschedule. We were towards the front of the line but there were still maybe 15 or so people ahead of us. We couldn't get through to the American Airlines customer service number (since everybody was trying to call them at the same time) so we decided it was worth it to wait. So we waited and we waited and about 1.5 hours later there was a couple at the front of the line who were dealing with international travel plans. Forty-five minutes later, that same couple was still at the front. And by this time we have only one person working the desk. She seemed competent from what we heard filtering down the line, but there was only one of her. Daniel was joking around that right when we got up there, she'd decide to go on her break and we'd be left with no one. Bad Daniel, that should teach you to invoke airport jinx.
At any rate, 3 hours later we finally got to the front of the line. We had heard that every American Airline flight into Dallas today was cancelled. But Continental also does flights to Houston and directly from there to Tyler, our eventual destination in Texas. So we asked if we could avoid Dallas entirely and go through Houston. She seemed willing to call the Continental people to try to set that up for us. But then she realized that we had been planning to drive to Tyler and didn't have a ticket bought for that, and she couldn't do a two-tickets-for-one trade for us. Well, we had half-expected that so we asked when would be the earliest we could get to Dallas from any of the Bay Area airports. At that point we have gem #1 of the story: She declared she was going on break and would get us another agent to talk to. And off on break she went, half way through dealing with us.
Half an hour later, a manager-type person shows up and gives us all a pep talk to the extent of, "we're sorry but we can't control the weather. We do the best we can, but we don't have enough agents available right now and we don't expect tornados to happen." Yeah. I'm sorry but how the *heck* do you not expect tornados in the middle of the US? How do you not have a contingency plan to handle what happens when Texan airports shut down due to weather? If they had said they didn't expect earthquakes in Virginia or floods in Oklahoma, then maybe that'd be believable. But what kind of an airline doesn't expect storms in Dallas?
Eventually, the manager-type person herself finally deigned to touch the keyboard and deal with those few of us remaining in line. We waited patiently while she went through one at a time telling us "the 1pm flight is cancelled. The 3pm flight is cancelled... The 1am flight is cancelled" and then the whole deal again for flights out of Oakland and San Jose. We asked if they could validate our tickets for use on another airline but she claimed
"No, it's not our policy to do that since the weather isn't our fault."
"But the lady here before was doing it and some people ahead of us got rebooked on United."
"I'm sorry, that's against our policy."
Eventually, it came down to the fact that we couldn't get into Dallas until Saturday. So, since we were pretty much out of options at that point, we gave up and just shifted our whole trip over (Saturday to Saturday instead of Tuesday to Tuesday). And then we got crowning gem #2 of 'fun times in airports 101': as she fills out our information into her system she asks us, "How do you spell 'tornado'?" Sometimes, airline workers are their own parody.
So, yeah, our trip got shifted and we wasted most of the day at the airport. We'll have to miss the hobnobbing-with-the-bigshots Hertz dinner we were going to go to next week and our presentation in UTTyler will probably be rescheduled. And I'll have to email my 3rd term rotation lab and tell them I won't be able to start until a week later. But it could have been a lot worse. The guy behind us in line was going to Paris for an international track & field meet and ended up having to cancel his whole trip because of their incompetence. Now we just have to figure out a good way to get to the airport for a 7am flight on Saturday.
I am, however, now half-way convinced that AA has an explicit policy of leaving people to stew in line for as long as possible in the hopes that they give up and go away. Honestly, I wouldn't be the least surprised...
There were thunderstorms and tornados around Dallas today. We were supposed to fly into Dallas this morning.
So, we took the SamTrans bus to the airport and everything went very smoothly. We made it to the bus station exactly at 6:15, got to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Checked in our bag, went to the gate. Flight was scheduled to depart on time. Then about 15 minutes before boarding things began to go wrong. There were three flights going from SFO to DFW at precisely 9:25 today. We were on one of them. Guess which one got delayed by an hour? Well, that didn't actually matter -- we weren't in a particular hurry today. But then, guess whose flight got cancelled? Ours, of course, at least at first. That's when we first started hearing things about there being tornados in Dallas and over 300 flights getting grounded. Of course, at that point we got up to go stand in line at the check-in desk to try to see how we could reschedule or reroute or something. We were supposed to give a presentation at UT Tyler tomorrow at noon, so we wanted to get there before then.
Of course, after they announced the cancellation there was a whole plane-full of people waiting in line at the check-in desk to reschedule. We were towards the front of the line but there were still maybe 15 or so people ahead of us. We couldn't get through to the American Airlines customer service number (since everybody was trying to call them at the same time) so we decided it was worth it to wait. So we waited and we waited and about 1.5 hours later there was a couple at the front of the line who were dealing with international travel plans. Forty-five minutes later, that same couple was still at the front. And by this time we have only one person working the desk. She seemed competent from what we heard filtering down the line, but there was only one of her. Daniel was joking around that right when we got up there, she'd decide to go on her break and we'd be left with no one. Bad Daniel, that should teach you to invoke airport jinx.
At any rate, 3 hours later we finally got to the front of the line. We had heard that every American Airline flight into Dallas today was cancelled. But Continental also does flights to Houston and directly from there to Tyler, our eventual destination in Texas. So we asked if we could avoid Dallas entirely and go through Houston. She seemed willing to call the Continental people to try to set that up for us. But then she realized that we had been planning to drive to Tyler and didn't have a ticket bought for that, and she couldn't do a two-tickets-for-one trade for us. Well, we had half-expected that so we asked when would be the earliest we could get to Dallas from any of the Bay Area airports. At that point we have gem #1 of the story: She declared she was going on break and would get us another agent to talk to. And off on break she went, half way through dealing with us.
Half an hour later, a manager-type person shows up and gives us all a pep talk to the extent of, "we're sorry but we can't control the weather. We do the best we can, but we don't have enough agents available right now and we don't expect tornados to happen." Yeah. I'm sorry but how the *heck* do you not expect tornados in the middle of the US? How do you not have a contingency plan to handle what happens when Texan airports shut down due to weather? If they had said they didn't expect earthquakes in Virginia or floods in Oklahoma, then maybe that'd be believable. But what kind of an airline doesn't expect storms in Dallas?
Eventually, the manager-type person herself finally deigned to touch the keyboard and deal with those few of us remaining in line. We waited patiently while she went through one at a time telling us "the 1pm flight is cancelled. The 3pm flight is cancelled... The 1am flight is cancelled" and then the whole deal again for flights out of Oakland and San Jose. We asked if they could validate our tickets for use on another airline but she claimed
"No, it's not our policy to do that since the weather isn't our fault."
"But the lady here before was doing it and some people ahead of us got rebooked on United."
"I'm sorry, that's against our policy."
Eventually, it came down to the fact that we couldn't get into Dallas until Saturday. So, since we were pretty much out of options at that point, we gave up and just shifted our whole trip over (Saturday to Saturday instead of Tuesday to Tuesday). And then we got crowning gem #2 of 'fun times in airports 101': as she fills out our information into her system she asks us, "How do you spell 'tornado'?" Sometimes, airline workers are their own parody.
So, yeah, our trip got shifted and we wasted most of the day at the airport. We'll have to miss the hobnobbing-with-the-bigshots Hertz dinner we were going to go to next week and our presentation in UTTyler will probably be rescheduled. And I'll have to email my 3rd term rotation lab and tell them I won't be able to start until a week later. But it could have been a lot worse. The guy behind us in line was going to Paris for an international track & field meet and ended up having to cancel his whole trip because of their incompetence. Now we just have to figure out a good way to get to the airport for a 7am flight on Saturday.
I am, however, now half-way convinced that AA has an explicit policy of leaving people to stew in line for as long as possible in the hopes that they give up and go away. Honestly, I wouldn't be the least surprised...