The adventure begins with me getting to the airport with PLENTY of time and after sitting around Cleveland-Hopkins for a few hours/delays, American Airlines cancels my flight! Mass chaos. I’m freaking out, the other people that need to be on that plane are freaking out and the AA staff is not caring. I feel they have deleted the word “help” from their vocabulary and replaced it with the phrase “this isn’t our fault (subtext: suck it customer)”.
There is a huge line of people trying to speak to the ONE AA attendant at the gate so I have to leave the terminal and talk to someone at the ticket desk because the lady on the customer service line was doing a lot of “ooooohhhh, yeah, that’s no good. I wonder if there’s anything we can do”. Terrifyingly stupid. So the guy at the ticket desk gets me on a plane to NYC (my connecting city) through Delta but that plane gets delayed and I have to decide whether to have someone drive back to Cleveland, pick me up and try the whole thing again two days from now (all flights to NYC were booked…??). I decide to just take the late plane to NYC, spend the night there and fly out tomorrow, but first I go through security AGAIN (it’s really just torture to have to do that once, but twice!?) and then spend 10 hours…yup 10, in the Cleveland airport. At least there were lots of pictures of the Rock’n’Roll hall of fame. If you want to know how many triangular windows are used in the front of that building, I’m totally your man. At least Delta gave me money vouchers for another trip, even though I was never booked with them (love Delta, hate AA). I get on the plane and the pilot tells us we have to wait even longer before taking off. Girl behind me freaks out. I stifle my desire to turn around and punch her while yelling “approaching hour 11 in this place”.
Finally land in NYC, but the train goes into Manhatten from JFK and THEN back to my apartment in Queens. Can’t and I won’t. Decide to take a taxi…the line is over 100 people long to hail one. E-Que me? No. I weasel one of the private car guys down to a really good deal, he takes me home and I wonder if it was a good idea to just get in his car without checking if he is legit or a gypsy cab or just a mugger. All is well. I end up at my apartment with my roomie and subletter, sleep and head back to JFK ready for SPAIN!
Whoops, the nightmare hasn’t ended. I called AA the night before to make sure everything got changed to my new itinerary after missing the flight to Madrid the night before…oops, it’s a requirement that you must be incompetent to work for American Airlines and that guy at the desk the day before DID rebook my flight to Madrid, but the next flight to my final destination (Santander) he booked for the wrong day. If he was a candy he would not be a smarty. Or even a nerd. He’d be a dum-dum. I just deal with the fact that I’m going to get to Santader over 24 hours later than I was supposed to and I just keep trucking…But there are those gosh darn AA employees again, ready to stop me. I go to check in and the system does not let me! It keeps saying that I missed my flight (which I did but I was putting in the code for the new flight I was on and supposedly already checked in for). It said that I had to speak to an attendant. You know how I love them and how many of them are readily available. The only person by the 20 self check-in machines helps two people who were not waiting as long as I was and when I said “I just have a quick question” she snaps “these people were here first!” I say, calmly (probably not lol), “No they weren’t”. She says, “if you want help you have to wait”. I’m just relieved to discover they DO know the word help.
After twenty minutes of waiting, not knowing if I even have a flight to Madrid, she finally listens to my question about my ticket and says “Oh…you need to be in that line over there”…………………steam is literally spewing from mi cabeza (I wish that when I got angry I broke into fluent Spanish, but I think that only happens for people who are…fluent in Spanish). I rush over to the other line and the woman there FINALLY “helps” me. She gets my ticket and makes sure I’m checked in. Then she tells me my bag is overweight. I take things out and when she is not looking put them back in. I get on the plane and next stop SPAIN!!!!!!!
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