The Adventures of an Uneasy Rider

I don’t like Northwest or Delta Airlines at all...

My dad, who is a seasoned traveler, says our experience is pretty typical of commercial air travel, but it still pisses me off to no end...

It all started back in September, when we booked a vacation package to Las Vegas for late March... Six months in advance of our trip, we got a pretty good price on airline tickets and hotel accommodations, and we were able to get non-stop flights to and from Vegas... Everything was just peachy...

Then, in December, the troubles began...

I got an e-mail that our non-stop flights had been changed on both ends... Now we were flying through Minneapolis on our way to Vegas, and through Memphis on our way home... In addition to the aggravation of losing our direct flights and spending more time on airplanes, having to change planes, make connecting flights on time, hope our luggage gets transferred properly, etc., we were now arriving in Vegas 3.5 hours later than originally scheduled, leaving Vegas an hour earlier, and arriving home 3 hours later...

I got on NWA’s website and discovered that they were still selling tickets for the non-stop flight home that we had been bumped from! The non-stop flight to Las Vegas was no longer being offered, but the non-stop flight from Vegas was still being sold!

So I called NWA and spoke to a woman who couldn’t explain why we got bumped from the return flight, but she was able to put us back on the original flight home that we booked... We were SOL on the flight out, though, as she informed me that NWA had simply cancelled that flight in its entirety... “That happens sometimes,” she told me... So we were stuck going through Minneapolis...

In late January--about 60 days prior to our trip--we were able to get on-line and reserve our seats... I got on NWA’s website, got our seats on the Indy-to-Minny flight and the Minny-to-Vegas flight, but the flight from Vegas to Indy wasn’t available to reserve seats yet... I figured I’d check back in a few days and get those reserved, too... I got back on-line a week later to discover that the flight was already full... No seats to be reserved... There were still some open seats on the chart, but they were handicapped-access seats, exit row seats, and a few other seats reserved for “elite service” or whatever NWA calls their plan where people pay extra money to be treated as if they’re better than the rest of humanity... None of those seats could be reserved by a commoner such as myself...

I checked and checked over the course of several weeks, but no seats became available... I was starting to get pretty pissed that we may not have seats on the flight we reserved six months in advance... I had wanted to handle the vacation arrangements by myself, but I eventually felt obligated to tell the Mrs. that we may be hitch-hiking back to Indy from Vegas...

The Mrs., after being with me for a decade, is well aware of the fact that I struggle mightily with patience and tact, while foul language is something that comes easily to me... So in an effort to prevent us from being kicked off all our flights and universally banned from the entire airline industry, she called NWA instead of me calling them...

As quickly as she hung up, I knew there was a problem...

The woman who “helped” her on the phone didn’t really help her at all... She told the Mrs. that the Computer Gods had not bestowed her with the power to give us any of the exit row seats, despite the Mrs.’s assurances that, assuming I survived a plane crash, I was physically capable of opening the exit door... When the Mrs. expressed her irritation with not having seats on a flight we reserved several months ago, the woman said without feeling, “That must be frustrating”...

I continued checking on-line every day up until the day before we left for Vegas, and no seats ever became available...

On the day before we left, I checked us in on-line and printed out our boarding passes... I discovered at that point that, since the Mrs. and I were each checking one suitcase, we would be charged an additional $30.00 to check our luggage... What the hell?! And, of course, we’d be charged ANOTHER $30.00 to check our luggage on the way home... What the HELL?!?!?! Since we needed clothes in Vegas, and since the Mrs. had already gone through the trouble of packing, and since we didn’t want to have to buy an entirely new wardrobe upon our return home, I had no choice but to pay NWA an additional $60.00 on top of what I had already paid them for the tickets, just to get our luggage there and back... The logic of this is absolutely baffling to me... Who the hell flies without luggage??? (That question would be answered for me later...) And why not just charge an additional $60.00 for the plane tickets, and not charge for luggage?

So we got to the Indy Airport at some God-awful hour in the morning so that we could be herded like cattle through NWA’s baggage check line, run the security gauntlet (which is rather nerve-wracking for someone who doesn’t travel much and who is pretty sure that he would not enjoy a cavity search by TSA personnel, not to mention the inconvenience of basically having to undress before walking through a metal detector), and find our way to our gate at least 17 hours prior to our flight, or whatever the Air Travel Powers-That-Be recommend...

On the bright side, during the very long period of time between our arrival at the airport and the departure of our flight, the Mrs. asked a NWA employee about our non-existent seat assignments on our flight home... With a couple of keystrokes, he secured us two exit row seats... Amazing how that worked... He must have been new to the NWA organization and not completely familiar with the stick-it-to-the-customer tactics universally employed by the company...

As we boarded the plane, I learned what kind of person flies without checking luggage... It’s a large percentage of the passengers who just carry their luggage onto the plane... Those boxes that your carry-on luggage are supposed to fit into to make sure they meet airline regulations are apparently just a loose suggestion, because people carried on enormous suitcases, many more than the one carry-on piece allowed, guitars, skis, javelins, and I swear one guy carried on a tuba... How do you carry on more than your allotted one piece? The secret is apparently to call two or three of your carry-on bags “purses” and then they somehow don’t count toward the allowed total... Laptops and DVD players apparently don’t count, either... Neither do shopping bags... All of these items were wielded like weapons on a cramped aircraft as we boarded, while their owners scrambled for domination of the limited overhead space, swinging their oversized luggage over their heads, not caring who they hit on the way up, and cramming them into the overhead compartments that were way too small for all their crap, since they were designed to hold carry-ons that actually FIT in those boxes at check-in and at the gate...

The flight from Indianapolis to Minneapolis wasn’t bad at all... Everything went as planned, Captain Phil skillfully landed the jet as smoothly as you can hope for, and we even landed early, despite leaving Indy a few minutes late... We had a bit of a walk to our connecting flight’s gate, but we had plenty of time, found it easily, and plunked down in a chair in our terminal just in time to see the rain that had been falling turn into snow... Lots of snow... Big flakes, too... We groaned, wondering how long Mother Nature would delay us...

But Delta Airlines--NWA’s parent company as of October, and our provider for this leg of the trip--began the boarding process on schedule... Except as the Mrs. and I had our boarding passes scanned, the clerk kept getting an error message that our seat numbers had been changed... We were pulled out of line and informed that we were now sitting about 10 rows farther up in the plane, and instead of having a middle seat and a window seat (for the Mrs.) near the back of the plane, we now had a middle seat and an aisle seat right on the wing... No forewarning... No explanation... No apologies for the inconvenience... And no window for the Mrs., even though she wouldn’t have been able to see much, except for the wing, where we had been relocated...

As we spoke with other passengers, we discovered that several other parties had been relocated, and some had been separated... The guy with the window seat in our row was separated from his girlfriend, who was several rows in front of us and on the other side of the plane... This obviously distressed both of them greatly... A family traveling together was separated and spread all throughout the plane... And no one had been informed of the reassignments until they started boarding the aircraft... We never did find out why we had all been moved around...

The flight crew looked and behaved as though they had recently started working for Delta after spending the last four decades working as guards in a Russian gulag... I fell asleep at one point in my aisle seat and apparently slumped a bit toward the aisle... I was abruptly awakened when I was body-checked by someone walking by, with no “excuse me” or “sorry” or “oops, did I just separate your shoulder?”... It was harder than some of the hits I took playing football... Turns out, it was one of the stewardesses...

After we sat in the cramped aircraft with no air flow for about 15 minutes without moving, the pilot finally got on the PA system and informed us that there was a “mechanical problem” that needed to be fixed... That’s not something that an inexperienced air traveler wants to hear... It was something to do with the engine’s overheating sensor, and it would be about 15-20 minutes before they could get it fixed...

Thirty minutes later, the pilot was back on the PA, telling us that they had kind of fixed the problem...sort of... The new sensor worked...sometimes... That wasn’t good enough for the captain, though, so it would be another 10-15 minutes before they could spray some engine cleaner on it to see if that helped... I thought to myself, Why not slap on some chicken wire and duct tape, too, as long as you’re fixing it right? Another 30 minutes later, the pilot advised us that MacGyver had finally been able to use a toothpick, a paper clip, some axle grease, and a lighter to fix the plane, and we were now all ready to...................get de-iced...

So we got in line to get de-iced, since snow and a “wintry mix” had been falling on the plane for a couple of hours, at least... We were 8th in line... It could have been worse, though... We could have been on one of the 10-15 planes sitting behind us...

Thirty minutes later, they sprayed a little foam on the plane and called us de-iced... It was a lot like the foam that is on your car when you go through a car wash... Not very convincing that we were de-iced... I didn’t hear any removal of any ice whatsoever... I didn’t see anyone scraping the windows... Just foam...

But nevertheless, 90 minutes late, we were in the air and headed to Las Vegas... Igor, Olga, and the other delightful comrades who served as our flight attendants never once cracked even the slightest grin throughout the entire flight... No one dared complain about the moldy bread and dirty water they occasionally threw at us for sustenance during our five hours on the plane... We arrived about five hours later than we would have, had we been able to keep our original non-stop flight... That’s five hours less vacation... But I suppose I should be happy that the plane held together, the flight crew didn’t strip me naked and throw me in solitary confinement, and the magic de-icing foam worked...

The trip home wasn’t nearly the odyssey that the trip to Vegas was, except that the seat the Mrs. sat in had apparently been occupied by an 800-lb. gorilla for 48 straight hours prior to the Mrs. sitting in it, because the foam was mashed down to about an eighth of an inch... So basically it was like sitting on bleachers for 3.5 hours... I had a middle seat, and I’m broad-shouldered, so I felt like I was crammed into a sardine can all the way home... And the stewardess making all the announcements on the PA system wasn’t even close to speaking English as her first language... It was probably somewhere around her third or fourth language... No one understood a thing she said for the entire flight... But the plane didn’t crash, our luggage arrived in one piece, and we actually arrived 20 minutes early, so I can’t complain too much...

Seasoned travelers will probably yawn at this account, telling me that this is how air travel normally is... My question is this...why does it have to be like this? As airlines struggle to survive, primarily after 9/11, wouldn’t it make more sense to lower prices, eliminate hidden fees, and treat customers like valued human beings in an effort to attract more business? Instead, we’re treated like cattle being led to slaughter... I paid an exorbitant amount of money for certain services, but NWA repeatedly changed what they initially advertised, never offering to return any of the money I paid for the services I was no longer receiving... They didn’t honor their end of the agreement, but I’m still expected to honor my end... And that, apparently, is acceptable behavior in today’s world... How did we, as a society, reach this point? When did the outrage over this kind of treatment end, and we just decided to take it up the keister without complaint?

I can’t wait for the next SOB who works for an airline to be placed on probation with me... First, I’m going to change the start and end dates of his probation without notifying him, and then I’ll extend his probation by a year...again, with no notice... When he complains, I’ll say, “That happens sometimes”... Then I’ll start charging him random fees... A probation start fee of $100... A probation discharge fee of $100... No one will have told him about those fees...they’ll just be a little surprise for him... But he can’t start or end probation until he pays them! I’ll make him report to my office 3 hours prior to his appointment time...which I’ll change frequently without notifying him... I’ll make him drive to my office by way of Wisconsin... When he gets to my office, I’ll make sure he has to strip naked and walk through the metal detector 17 times before it stops beeping, while 10 or 12 security thugs stare at him, waiting for my signal to give him a cavity search... During our meetings, I’m going to make him wait for hours on end on an uncomfortable chair next to a big fat smelly guy in a stuffy little closet with no air circulation... Periodically, I’ll make promises to him that his misery will end shortly, only to leave him in there for another 2 or 3 hours... When he complains, I’ll say, without feeling, “That must be frustrating”... If he brings a briefcase, I’ll be sure to beat the hell out of it, set it out in the rain for a few hours, and then send it to Denver... And at the end of it all, I’ll smile at him and tell him to come back for more real soon!