Dorothea Does Dallas
(I’m sorry. My only defense is that if I hadn’t used that title, somebody else woulda.)
Yeah, so I got to the San Antonio airport in plenty of time to check in and find my gate; American Airlines lives in the not-quite-so-pretty part of the airport. The plane to Dallas before us duly loaded and took off. We were told to go to the gate next door, where ours would be coming in. Then, because clear visual evidence indicated that our pilot couldn’t count gates, we boarded at the gate we’d been told to move away from.
We pushed away from the gate, and taxied a bit, and then we sat. And sat. And sat. Weather in Dallas, we were told. Not a big storm, moving quickly; we’d be on our way in 45 minutes or so.
Three hours (and several “want a bus back to the terminal?” calls) later…
Three hours later, air-traffic control let us go, despite lightning coming in on our left. The flight was a bumpetty-bumpetty-whee! of a roller-coaster until we got above the storm. On landing in Dallas, we heard that the San Antonio airport shut down five minutes after we took off.
Not a big storm my sore knee. It was a hell of a big storm. Tornadoes. DFW shut up like a clam for several hours. Not an open gate to be had, we were told.
Three more hours later… yes, you heard that right, about seven and a half hours on that damnable plane… they finally managed to let us into the airport, where there was only one harassed gate agent available to get us rebooked. (I heard people calling the airline on their cell phones. All in all, sounded pretty pointless to me. Phone agents? Clueless.)
The flight crew swung through, fired up another terminal, and… got themselves booked into their hotel. In full view of the line. Not only do we not do customer service any more, we airlines, we rub it in our customers’ faces that we don’t. I don’t actually begrudge the flight crew their hotel rooms, as we had been a fractious crowd, but I truly don’t think it would have killed them to move down a gate or two and fire up a terminal there, just for the look of the thing.
Mr. Scott Vernon, the harassed gate agent, was the only decent part of the whole thing. My flight to Madison had been cancelled, and I’m guessing the ones who’d made it to DFW had all been rebooked already, jamming the next day’s American flights. Still, Mr. Vernon beat the living crap out of his keyboard until he had an answer. “Northwest, 6 am, going through Minneapolis, getting into Madison at 11:30. Okay?”
“Works for me,” I said. Pause, as my brain caught up to the situation. “Unless it starts snowing or something.” In spite of everything, he did manage a small but sincere smirk.
He handed me two green-and-tan pieces of paper. “You’ll need to get there at about 5 am. E terminal.”
“No problem; I’m not going anywhere,” I said. What was the point? Clock said well past 1 in the morning, and we already had word hotels were jammed. “Thank you, sir.”
I meandered my way onto the Skylink and off again in E terminal, called my husband at long last to explain the situation (I would have called earlier, but D terminal doesn’t seem to have pay phones), and here I am at ten past two, recharging Buffle at the security gate and hooked up to T-Mobile wireless. (I didn’t spend eighty bucks on a hotel room, so I figured ten bucks for awake-keeping material wasn’t a huge splurge.)
If by some weird freak of chance you’re awake at this ungodly hour? I’m on IM. Say hi.