Come Fly with Me

... or not.

I went to southern California with my boss this week. We were scheduled to leave on Sunday afternoon. We didn’t get out of El Paso until Monday morning.

First, the gate agent told us that the plane had mechanical difficulty in Phoenix, so it would be late arriving in El Paso. A while later, we were told that the plane had taken off but returned to Phoenix because of "mechanical difficulty" again. (I overheard the gate agent tell her coworker that a fire extinguisher had gone off in the cargo cabin.) However, we were assured that the delay would not cause any of us to miss connecting flights.

At 4:35 p.m., the notice board was changed to list our departure time as 5:30 p.m. (nearly 2.5 hours after the scheduled time). We were asked to line up, and they would start changing our connections. Rest assured, though, that the plane was in the air and on its way. (We weren’t told exactly when the plane took off, though.)

When the following plane arrived at our gate, we were switched to the gate next door. As the plane loaded, we found out that it, too, was going to Phoenix. Why couldn’t we have been booked on that plane? Because there were only four seats available for about a hundred of us.

Our plane then arrived and unloaded its passengers. We boarded. The door was closed. The steward made the obligatory safety warnings. ("In the unlikely event of a water landing...." Between El Paso and Phoenix? Very unlikely.) He shut the pilots’ cabin door and sat down in his chair, ready for departure. Then, the cabin door bumped against his seat. One of the pilots needed to get off the plane. After a couple of minutes, I overheard the steward reply to the pilot, "I can’t make an announcement unless they connect us to ground power."

Uh-oh.

The steward then shouted to us that we had to get off the plane because there was no power. The plane literally could not start.

Back in the terminal, we watched the other plane pull away from their (our) gate and depart. We were told to line up to change our flights yet again, but it would be better for most of us to go to the ticket counter downstairs because, "there are only two computers up here". Guess how many were downstairs? If you guessed two as well, you’re right!

An hour later, we were still in line. There was only one other flight out of El Paso that night, to Las Vegas, but it was already oversold by 25 seats. Did we want the 6 o’clock flight or the 8 o’clock flight the next morning? (Oh, wait. It doesn’t matter what I want; my boss is with me.) Also, my boss decided he didn’t want to drive back to Las Cruces, so he got us hotel and meal vouchers in El Paso. Of course, the rental car and hotel had to be rescheduled (now that we finally knew when we’d arrive in California), and the coworkers we were scheduled to meet had to be notified that we wouldn’t get to the site until the afternoon. Naturally, I had to do all that, too. (Someone needs to teach my boss that delegating doesn’t mean making your underlings do everything for you while you put up your feet in a hotel room.) At 9 o’clock, I was finally going to eat dinner -- three hours after we should have landed in California.

In my next post, I’ll continue on the saga of my trip. (Note that I safely returned.)