Suzanne and I had promised each other a fun trip to Chicago for our mutual birthdays this past August (sans kids, no less!). We were lucky enough to stay at a fantastic apartment owned by Suzanne's Dad's friend Moe, who lives on the outskirts of Chicago but comes in once a month or so to spend the weekend downtown at his apartment. Moe's place is in the perfect spot for Chicago exploration and goofing around. It's about a block from Michigan Avenue, a few blocks from the lake, and smack in the middle of everything and anything you could possible want to do downtown. Moe was nice enough to give us the run of the place while we were there, and he even set us up with tickets on the mass transit system and passes to the King Tut exhibition at the Field Museum.
We had a wonderful time during out long weekend in Chicago. We went on a bike tour of the city, saw the Tut exhibit, had several fantastic meals (the Chicago Chop House is excellent), explored neighborhood art festivals, and saw Wicked, which was deviously good. It was a little sad when we called the kids because all three sounded so small and far away, but Chicago deep dish pizza is a miraculous elixir for that kind of sorrow.
Nothing could have ruined such a great trip. But American Airlines came close.
On our last day, we met Moe for lunch at The Four Farthings, a British pub-style restaurant. Our flight was at 4:00, so we jumped on the train in plenty of time to make the flight. Once we got to the airport, we were told our flight was delayed by an hour, which wasn't a big deal because we had a two and a half hour layover in Dallas, so we had plenty of time.
We got on the plane exactly an hour later, settled down, strapped in, and the pilot came on over the PA telling us bad weather had rerouted all flights going to Dallas. Our flight, by the way, was cancelled.
At first I thought this was a joke, but it wasn't and so we were all forced off with the helpful instructions that someone at gate A-24 would help us with our connections. What we didn't know was this: there was no one at A-24. There were just computer terminals. Everyone knows how computers excel at customer service.
Since Suzanne is clever, she called the American Airlines reservation desk while we waited in line. After an unpleasantly long wait, the operator told us the airline had already reschedule our flight to Dallas for the next morning out of Midway airport, an airport across town. Suzanne tried to impress up on her our babysitting dilemma (which, quickly, can be summed up thusly: three kids and a babysitter were expecting us home at 10:00 that evening), but American Airlines sympathy was in short supply. The best we could do, they said, was to get on the standby list.
Super. We rushed to the gate where the next flight was leaving for Dallas and tried to get on the standby list. They added us and the sign behind the agent's desk said we were 60 and 61 on the list. A minute later we were 82 and 83. A minute later we were 95 and 96. We were getting bumped off the standby list!
That flight took off without us. Oddly, that flight left half an hour after our cancelled flight. Apparently the emergency weather situation, whose immediacy required flight cancellations, had cleared up. Strangely, we would have been in the air and on the way to Dallas when this happened, so we would have been able to land just fine. I think the brainiac scientists at American Airlines cannot grasp this type of advanced word problem.
Flight after flight we crept higher on each passing standby list until, finally, at midnight the gate agents, whose bitter, pinched faces had yet to crack a smile called our names. Well, let me revise that. They called one name. There was one seat available. We both knew Suzanne had to take it so she could at least get home first thing in the morning (fortunately our babysitter was able to spend the night, but she had to leave by noon the next morning).
Suzanne rushed down the jetway. That's when the gate agent called her back. No, they told her, she couldn't get on. A ticketed passenger just appeared and didn't know anything about the flight because she only spoke Spanish. Too bad for us.
Once the flight left, I asked the gate agent about what had just happened because I knew the agent had all the authority in the world to let Suzanne on the flight. I also asked her why she just broke every single rule about being at the gate in time for the flight, but the agent was the most exasperating and rude person I had ever run across in any airport. All she could say was the woman they let on was a ticketed passenger. When I tried to tell her we also were ticketed passengers, she simply shrugged and said it was her supervisor's call. This was a lie because she talked to no one about this situation. No supervisor. No co-conspirator. No airport lacky. No one. She was a liar.
I realized then that there are people who exist solely to perpetuate bureaucracies and the hell they inflict upon normal people.
We were left alone in the airport with no where to go, our only plan was to try and catch standby seats on the six a.m. flight the next morning. I refused to end our great and glorious birthday by sleeping in an airport, so we found a cheap deal on a room at the Day's Inn, which was a short shuttle bus ride away. Well, short as in 25 minute ride, ending up in the middle of adult bookstore and Nudie Emporium row.
The shuttle ride to this scary motel was wretched. We had to cram into a bus with a family of nine people from India. Suzanne had to sit on a small wooden stool between the driver and the passenger. During the entire ride, the family talked incessantly in incomprehensible Hindi, chattering loudly with each other, amplifying the pounding in my head until I wanted to throttle someone. And then the woman sitting right next to me began meowing. Like a cat. Meow. Meow. Meow. I nearly screamed in a murderous rage, "That's not even a language! Stop talking! Stop it now!"
But right as I was about to snap, we pulled up to the hotel. The family disappeared someplace in the hotel's dark walkways while we checked in, warned by the sign over our heads that we had to be 18 or older to get a room. The man behind the desk, a large, bald, tattooed man closed his laptop lid halfway to avoid losing his internet connection and, most certainly, bittorrent porn feeds, and grimaced at us as he checked us in. The room itself had the stale smell of a place in transition between smoking and non-smoking. The pillows were cracker thin, the mattresses lumpier than a Klingon's head, but it was a glorious two hours of sleep until we had to board the shuttle again and make it back to the airport in time to pass through security.
We made the six a.m. flight and got home by lunch. The kids had decorated the house with signs saying how much they missed us, and we got plenty of big hugs when we saw everyone. That made the 18 hour trip home worthwhile.
Not that I'd pay to do it again, mind you. But it was worthwhile all the same.
