Hell's Departure Lounge

This was my Odyssey.

All I wanted to do, you see, was get home. I had just spent a lovely four days on the North Shore of Massachussetts, travelling up the coastline visiting little towns and just relaxing. It had been so relazing, in fact, that I had begun to soften my hardline position that the world is a rude and ugly place. I had begun to feel what some people call hope (and hope, of course, is what Terry Pratchett refers to as 'that greatest of treasures.')

Ah. But then I went through airport security.

I had found a cheap round trip ticket on US Airways, which is the daughter company of a recent merger of USAir and America West - a merger which was being loudly touted from walls on posters and from thumped chests of ticket agents on buttons. Great things afoot, the atmosphere seemed to say. Here, in this place, the perils which have beset the airline industry as a whole are firmly held at bay.

It should have been simple: a short flight from Boston to Philadelphia, and then from Philadelphia to Nashville. Simple, in my life, implies a certain level of tolerance, of course, and Things Do Happen. But within reason, no? A certain level of tolerance goes a long way under Normal Circumstances.

But Normal Circumstances had, apparently, followed my lead and taken a holiday somewhere on the North Shore.

We were delayed getting off the ground, due to a bad weather system throughout the middle Atlantic states. Then, after an hour, we got off the ground, and were delayed in the air from landing by, again, severe weather. Once we got on the ground (after an extra 45 minutes in the air) we were delayed on the tarmac, three times, by what is called a "ramp closure".

Closing the Ramp, apparently, involves pulling back all ground crew from service and halting all traffic in and out of the airport. Nothing moves. Which means, of course, that the third time we stopped on the tarmac, 30 feet from the gate, that was exactly where we stayed. 30 feet from the gate. For another half hour.

Needless to say, I was late making my connecting flight. My connecting flight had miraculously managed to make it out in one of the windows when the ramp had not been closed. Now, this is understandable, and still well within my level of tolerance.

We were told that a gate agent would meet us upon our debarking from the plane, to assist us in making new connections. So, upon debarking and calling the nice person in Nashville who would have been picking me up at about that time at the Nashville airport and informing her that I was in the airport at last, only not the right one, I got in the line to talk to the station agent.

After about five minutes of waiting in line, the station agent suddenly announced loudly to the crowd that he couldn't help us anymore, and that we all would have to go to the other end of the terminal to wait in another line to talk to the customer service agents.

Thinking this a rather loose interpretation of the promise we heard on the plane that "an agent would be waiting at the gate to help," we all just stared at the agent, mute.

"No, I mean it," he repeated. "I'm leaving. You'll have to go to the other desk."

So I turned and made my way, like the rest, to the other end of the terminal. Ah, now being at the back of the line was an advantage, as it meant I got to a higher place in the new line. Tolerance. Sweet tolerance.

After an hour in the new line, though, tolerance was waning. Of the three agents at the desk, one kept leaving to talk on her cell phone, and the other two seemed about as efficient as, well, a post office after a bad fire. Ten minutes per person seemed to be the average, we determined (my stalwart co-queued companions and I), and we heard through the grapevine that the folks still not quite at the front of the line (which was not so far from us) had been standing where we were standing, two hours ago.

Lovely.

At some point, two more agents arrived, but the comedy of errors continued. The line moved a little faster, only now new plagues erupted. Computers began crashing. Printers ceased to work. The devil, it seemed, was in the details, and no one was bothering to pay attention to the fine print. I will spare you, gentle reader, of the many grumblings which ensued.

I will detail for you, however, that when I finally got to have my time at the desk, it was with a gate agent that (I swear, I am not using this term in anything but the most accurate sense) was literally mentally challenged. Everything I said, or indeed anyone said to him, was repeated back, slowly, and pondered at great length before any action was taken. Watching him type was a Chinese water torture of one-fingered hunt-and-pecking. It should go without saying as well that it was when he finally was trying to print out my new boarding passes that the computer printer went down again. Despairing, after five minutes of watching his slow, bumbling attempts to fix it, I howled for a manger.

This was, in fact, the limit of my tolerance.

So now, armed at last with boarding passes in hand, I was informed that the airline does not offer hotel considerations for delays due to weather, and my flight home was leaving at 6:45 the next morning (it was then just after midnight). So I found the bar (ordered a two-fisted set of beers to brace my rattled nerves), and then the all-night Chinese restaurant in the other terminal (good egg rolls, sub-par shrimp fried rice), and had great impromptu conversations with my fellow refugees. I really didn't sleep at all that night, though there was one fitful nap on the floor of gate B-19, for about an hour. Never was I more glad that I always travel with my travel pillow strapped to my backpack.

The next morning should have gone smoothly. Instead of a direct flight, I was re-routed to Charlotte, and from there to Nashville. Fine. So I got to my gate, fueled with a breakfast of chocolate and vanilla swirl yogurt cone, and got on the plane. Thank you.

And there we sat on the plane. For two hours. Two hours, and a lot of that time with the air off (and it was hot). Apparently, we finally were told, the ground crew had put too much fuel on the plane, and it had to be siphoned off. Why they hadn't taken care of this the night before (since, trust me, that flight had been on the boards since 2am - I was checking) is beyond me.

So, needless to say, I got to Charlotte late, and missed my connecting flight.

(There is a funny word we used to employ in German class: abgefukt)

Now there had been snafu's all through the system, of course, and also some flights from Chicago had been cancelled that morning, so there were now a lot of people trying to scramble to get where they were going. The earliest I was told I could get on a flight was 5pm that afternoon.

Did you know that they now have places in the airport where you can get massages? I splurged and got one. If I was going to be shouldering burdens like some slacker caryatid, some transient Atlas, I wanted to make sure my shouldering equipment was in peak shape.

Refreshed, I stormed the nearest customer service counter I could find, with my trademark mix of sweet charm and steely assertiveness. By the end of my seige, I was booked on a 1pm flight. They had tried to route me through Atlanta. No, thank you. The thought of another connecting flight made visions of late career Tom Hanks movies dance in my head. I got to get out of this place, I kept repeating. Direct flights only, please.

When I got to the gate, the agent asked me (of course) if I would be willing to be bumped to a later flight?

No. No, thank you.

When I finally got back to Nashville, after twenty-two hours behind airport security, I had decompressed enough to remark, ruefully, that at no point had anyone offered me an apology, or anything other than grudging consideration. It was, though and through, a completely miserable experience.

The road to Hell is, of course, paved by the Tennessee Department of Transportation. But if you choose to fly, trust me, you'll be booked on US Airways.