It had been a long week, and we were ready to get home. The Kansas City Seven headed out early from the last conference session and drove to the airport to catch our 2:40 flight to LaGuardia, where we would have a three hour layover before boarding that last plane home to Vermont. We checked the flight status as we sneaked out of the back of the mega-sanctuary; everything was on time and smooth. There were no bumps as we returned the rental car, stepped through security, and prepared to take off. The seven of us were sitting down for a quick lunch when Dark Murmurs got the text.
*FLIGHT STATUS UPDATE* – Your flight has been delayed and will now leave at 5:36
Ok, not good. There went our layover. In fact, we were now sure to miss our connecting flight at 9:50. I needed to know what gates our incoming and outgoing flights would be at in NY. I needed to know if we could be re-routed, so as not to be trapped overnight anywhere. My sister-in-law was getting married the next day and I needed to be home. With full confidence in the power of airline customer service, I picked up the phone and made the call.
13-21 minute wait time, said the computer. They would call me back. So I hung up, had another bite of lunch with Dark, and waited. When they called back, they were delighted to inform me that our plane was not delayed after all. Really? The plane is not delayed? Even though we got a text saying it was delayed, and all the signs here at the airport are saying delayed, and everyone here agrees that it is delayed? Yes, really. The airport’s computers must not have been updated yet. Our plane will still leave on time. So with this pleasantly startling bit of information, I hung up the phone.
Good news everybody! Our plane is not actually delayed! It is just a computer glitch! Boy, one hopes that, at the airport of all places, maybe there wouldn’t be so many computer glitches, but at least we were going to get home on time. Or were we? Rumple Station, correctly not believing anything I said, asked the gate attendant what the deal was, and the deal was that there was no plane, and we were absolutely delayed until 5:36. I picked up the phone again, now slightly more annoyed at my friendly neighborhood airline guy with the glitchy computer.
15-25 minute wait time. Fabulous. I wait. They call. It’s a different person now, a woman, telling me that not only is our flight delayed, but we will definitely miss our connection. It is in an entirely different terminal at LaGuardia, and will necessitate a tram ride and other such time sucks. Not good. So is there any way we could fly through, say, Detroit instead? No, this is the only flight in the entire universe going to Burlington, VT for the rest of the day. If we miss our connection, we will have to sleep in the airport and try again tomorrow. Dark Murmurs is skeptical that this is true, but what else can we do?
At least their computers have finally caught up to the airports screens. They don’t say the exact same time (the airport now tells us the flight will leave at 5:26, instead of 5:36), but at least it is much closer. To make us less grumpy, the airline orders pizza for everyone on my flight. They post a guard downstairs in front of the pizza table, and the guard checks our boarding passes to make sure none of those Kentucky-bound people get any of our cheesybread.
The plane finally arrives, even later than we thought, and there is an issue with the cleaning crew either being too slow, or too thorough (I never discovered which), so we are told to gather round for a PowerBoard. Apparently we have a very narrow take-off window from the control tower which we will lose if we are not boarded, buckled, and leaving the gate in 8 minutes. Overhead bins be damned, we were going to get on that plane in 8 minutes.
15 minutes later we pulled back from the gate. It wasn’t 8 minutes, but it was still pretty damn fast. I don’t understand why we don’t PowerBoard all the time… We managed to get into the air and land in New York in the freezing and pouring rain. I pulled my t-shirt tightly around myself and stepped out into the driving rain, since there was no room at the inn gate. We ran down the tarmac to the waiting shuttle, clutching our planeside-checked luggage close to our shivery bodies. The doors closed, but too quickly. Two of our members had been left out to freeze. What to do?! Do we dare leave a man behind? Yes! We must! Leave them, leave them, drive quickly! We must make our connection. If five of us have survived, surely that is enough!
We arrived at the terminal to discover that our connecting flight had also been delayed significantly. We no longer had to worry about running across the airport. We even waited for our other two members, riding in on a second shuttle. The Kansas City Seven were reunited once again. I got home around 1 am, in plenty of time to attend the wedding which, fortunately, was scheduled to occur several hours after 1 am. Yes, we survived (all of us except my computer), which was a miracle in and of itself, because the airlines clearly have no idea what is going on.