Shell Shocked: Two days of hell
This is a true story although the name of the protagonist has not been changed to protect the innocent. The protagonist was moi.
It started innocently enough. As a natural born snowbird, I had some personal business to attend to up north and decided to pack them into a four-day trip to New Jersey. I made airline reservations through Priceline, the economy booker, and rented a car from Hertz. I made all my appointments complete with lunches, dinners, and in-person meetings (wearing a mask, of course) and was all set to go.
My trip was to start on a Sunday and my return was scheduled for the following Thursday. My flight was scheduled to depart at 1:45 p.m. Sunday. I decided to leave my car at home and take one of the island taxis instead. I printed out my boarding ticket the night before and checked the flight status before I left the house on Sunday. It was on time. All was going well so far.
When I arrived at RSW Airport I immediately headed to Terminal D. I went through security and entered the huge hall. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I’d never seen an airport more crowded before. People were standing next to each other shoulder to shoulder. There wasn’t a seat to be found. I spotted a departure board and noted that my flight was delayed for forty-five minutes. I could live with that.
When I blinked my eyes again I saw an empty stool at a bar of a fast food cafe. I took the seat before I noticed that there was a line waiting to get in of at least one hundred people. What saved me from having an angry mob tear me apart from limb to limb was that most of the people in the line were in pairs so that one available seat didn’t work for them. But angry eyes were still cast on me nonetheless. I nursed a diet Coke for about an hour and a half until it was time to board.
When it was I made my way to the gate. The departure time had been delayed again, this time by two hours. The reason given? Massive thunder storms and winds throughout Florida making take off tricky for all flights, not just mine.
Karma wasn’t working for me. That Sunday was the only stormy day we’d had in the area for months and that was the day my flight north was scheduled. I decided not to buy a lottery ticket that day.
I was getting more than a trifle uneasy. I had already planned a dinner in New Jersey for that evening. And now the new departure time could seriously jeopardize my ability to make that dinner. This was already getting to be a long day. I walked up and down trying to find somewhere else to sit. Finally, I saw a couple get up from their seats at a nearby gate and I almost tripped them as I lunged for one of their now vacated seats. Little did I know that I would spend the next four hours in that seat.
I began to check departure times on my cell phone. And as my good fortune that day would have it, the departure time kept moving forward periodically — one hour, an hour and a half, another hour.
Finally, after having been at the airport for some six hours with departure times moving forward rhymically, the flight was canceled. Well there goes that Sunday night dinner. There were no other flights scheduled for my destination the rest of that day, so I decided to go to the airline ticket counter to make new arrangements. That plan was soon aborted when I saw what looked like 200 people in line. And the same for every other airline ticket counter.
So, I decided to go back to my home on Sanibel to make travel arrangements from there. Then came the next rude awakening. There were no taxis available. There were no Ubers available. So, I did what any other red-blooded American would do. I rented a car to take me to Sanibel.
When I got home I called Priceline. A recorded voice told me it would be a seventy-minute wait. I didn’t have the patience for that. I called the airline. Same thing. I went online instead to see if I could rearrange my travel schedule there. I found a flight leaving for my destination the next morning. The only hitch was that it was a one-stopper, not a non-stop. The stop was in Dallas. So, I would have to fly from Fort Myers to Dallas and then Dallas to Newark. It was a seven-hour trip but would get me into Newark by late afternoon. I booked it.
I got to the airport the next morning bright and early. The departure board now said the flight was delayed and would be departing an hour and a half later. To make a long story short, the same thing happened again as the previous day. Delay, delay, delay. And then it could no longer make the Dallas connection. And then the flight was canceled, and they automatically rebooked me for the following morning, Wednesday.
It was déjà vu. But this time I was able to track down an Uber and went back to Sanibel. I began to try to work the phones and Internet again. I finally reached an airline agent via phone. I told her that because I had been booked on a flight without my authorization for the following day I had decided to cancel my trip altogether.
The agent said that I couldn’t do that because the flight on Wednesday morning was the same flight I had already booked. I asked her how could a flight that was originally scheduled to leave on a Tuesday be the same flight as one leaving the next day.
I got angry. She got defensive and asked me to hold while she spoke to a supervisor. I don’t know if it was out of spite or bureaucracy, but she kept me hanging for about forty minutes. Certain that she had already hung up on me I was about to hang up in frustration myself when she got back on. She told me that her supervisor had authorized my flight cancelation with a full refund. I thanked her and still had to deal with the car rental people, the reservations made at restaurants and the cancelation of all my appointments.
But at the very least my two days of hell were over with. I didn’t reschedule that trip because I didn’t want to be anywhere near an airport for a very long time to come.