ACT 1
Last week, Jim and I visited Jim's cousin in Titusville. There is a lot to say about our trips to Florida, most of which we begin with "Florida man...." regardless of the tale, because we think we're hilarious. This blog is about the airline called Southwest, and how they have managed to fail at just about everything this week. My research is first hand, as I was one of the thousands of passengers stranded due to their vague "tech connectivity issue". There are no names to change to protect any innocence, as I'll never see any of these people again. Also, I swore to focus on only the funny or the positive when I started writing again, but this experience will not be either. Snarky is the best I can do.
The first mistake I made, right out of the cannon, was letting anxiety drive the bus. When Jim and I awoke on Tuesday and realized the flight time had been written down wrong--by five hours---I said "I'm not hanging around here to wait. I'm ready to go." As background, you should know that: A) I will flip out when travel plans are not scheduled to leave in the morning (flight, car trip, yoga class- all of it). I have a very specific anxiety that counts hours and notes that most flights get cancelled after noon, snow storms worsen in the afternoons, I need to get moving early, period. I've always credited this--before this adventure when I realized it was destructive anxiety, not just a fun glitch in my personality--to being "farm people" who get everything done before dark. Whenever my cousins were in Denver for family reunions, we always went to Elitch's and we always, always arrived right when they opened because it always, always rained at 3 pm and we wanted to get as much fun crammed in as possible. So. There's that. B) My anxiety has increased exponentially the last few years. Most of you know why. C) I have control issues.
So when Jim said the flight was written down wrong, I said "Change it, I'll drive to the airport". Instead of a non stop, which we had scheduled and I need (I also will not do layovers or flights that stop, that's another Fun Glitch In My Personality) we had no choice but to pay to switch to an earlier flight that had a stop in Chicago. I hated everything about the situation, but needed to at least be On My Way Home. This is what happens when anxiety drives the bus. I'm a delight. This is not problematic in most of my life, since I'm a parent and teacher, I'm used to breathing, becoming hyper focused and figuring out the right choice for the moment. But in this case, I'm not trying to get 18 kids home from NYC, or herded through opening night, or through a missed birthday party. It was just me managing me and it went horribly wrong.
The first clue at the Orlando airport that something may be amiss besides my melting psyche, was the lack of a plane at our gate ten minutes before boarding time. At that moment, Tuesday 15 June, we had not checked the news reports. We did not know that the day before Southwest had begun to have "technical issues" with a "third party weather application" that had cancelled flights. I texted Harper and Genoa at home and said "I think there's a problem, we don't have a plane." We left Orlando late, but were headed to Chicago just fine.
We arrived in Chicago and the flight crew said "If Chicago is your final destination, please deplane and take your personal belongings. If Denver is your destination, please remain on the plane, we will count you before we take off again." So we waited, and everyone but us disembarked, and then the flight attendant said, this is word for word "The flight has been cancelled. Please get off the plane and go to gate M5 for information." That was some kinda bedside manner, huh? Confused, and believing that we needed to hurry to get on another flight, the 30 or so of us still on the plane ran down the concourse. We were met by stone faced clerks who simply put us on another flight, with no explanation as to why ours was cancelled. Zombie apocalypse? Mechanical issues? Nuclear warhead? It could have been anything. This is when I started to come apart. I started crying---not audibly, just tears streaming down my face---when she said "We can get you out of here tonight." TONIGHT?!?!??! WHAT???? What are you TALKING about? I'm supposed to be home in three hours, three hours, count them: three. My anxiety may be tied to control issues, hold please. "You don't have a gate yet, but here is your boarding pass." I looked at Jim and said "This isn't a real flight. What the hell is actually going on?"
I calmed down enough to get on Facebook, which is a great ranting journal for me, I usually go back and delete stuff if it's insane, and a friend in Dallas attached a NYT article about the "technical connectivity issues" Southwest was having. 500 flights cancelled, 1500 delayed. Jim and I shook our heads. I guess we live in Chicago now. We wandered the airport looking at monitors, hoping our flight number would appear. I helped a family flying from Tuscany to Istanbul in finding their gate. Why are they at O'Hare? They weren't flying Southwest. This encounter still vexes me, and added to my panic. If international flights were being held up in Chicago, WTF was actually going on? We walked the entire concourse looking for a beer. Nothing was open, none of the gift shops and few of the sandwich shops and even if it was, they did not have beer.
Weirdly Southwest is in the International Flight concourse, which has not been updated since the 1980's. There are no outlets to plug in your cell phone, and one restaurant. The line was long, and we saw several of our fellow "Cancellarians" ( I made it up, it sounded funny) in line. We chatted them up as we waited for someone to vacate a table in the astonishingly small restaurant. Jim's logic--he's not wrong---was if he could get a beer in me, we might live through this. We made friends with a lovely mom of two boys, maybe 14 and 10, one a lovely deep red head, who seemed undaunted by any of the delays. They were booked on the 6.30 pm flight, that had been delayed almost immediately, but they had a gate #(7), which made their flight more "real", we met a couple who were booked on the Chicago to Denver leg of our flight and found out it was cancelled ten minutes before boarding via the app---they easily could have stayed at their hotel and waited it out if Southwest had been honest with them much earlier, and Bree and David, 25 year old besties returning from their Disney/Universal/Harry Potter vacation. We invited David and Bree to sit with us, since tables were scarce and it seemed rude to take up two tables. We sat with them for two and half hours as we waited for a gate number to be revealed somewhere. None of the monitors had our flight on it, and they couldn't find it on their apps. We finally received a gate number, M11, which was located next to the restaurant. We could see there were passengers in Burkas and very well dressed, and realized that the gate itself was for British Airways. The sign at M11 still had the Dubai departure information, and the station that a Southwest employee should man to help passengers was empty.
The new, "imaginary" flight (I had a lot of jokes in my head about Wonder Woman's plane) was to board at 7:45 for an 8:15 departure. We left the restaurant at 6.30, by then we'd been in O'Hare for three and a half hours. We walked around the mostly closed concourse trying to locate an outlet to charge our phones. Bree had a battery powered charger that worked for a bit and then quit. We kept eying the gate, wondering when people who looked like us---haggard and stressed---would start arriving. Nobody showing up at this point looked like they'd been cancelled, which was another red flag. If nobody is waiting, the flight is not real. Jim and I walked to gate 7 to chat up our new friend, and she said they still didn't have a plane or any info other than they were delayed until 7.45. Still just as chill as iced tea, her family was just sitting calmly, reading and playing on their phones. I walked to gate 11 for the fifteenth time at 7 pm, and the monitor had changed to say DENVER. I looked at Mike and said "OK, we have a real gate. Maybe we'll get a plane." He and I had made a list of things that needed to happen before we relaxed. At 7.30 the gate began to fill up with more haggard looking folks like us, yet no Southwest employee ever emerged. We were all huddled around the three outlets when at 7:30, a guy we'd been talking to got a notice on his SW app that the flight was cancelled. There was still no SW employee at the gate, or any announcement. This is where anxiety turned to absolute hatred. I was no longer anxious about getting home, but angry that I was being lied to by the airline. There is no excuse for lack of communication my friends. Hire a stage manager. What follows is a list of what we witnessed as word of the cancellation spread:
A well dressed man approached me and asked if the flight was cancelled. I said "That's what we heard, but the site crashed so nobody knows." He looked over at his wife, who was clutching the hands of their two beautiful children, maybe five and seven, and she shook her head. The oldest of their daughters immediately broke and began quietly sobbing. If you weren't looking at her broken little face you wouldn't have known, but her big eyes were swimming with tears that then streamed down her face. Her younger sister was looing at her for some kind of reassurance, and finding none, clutched her stuffed "Sully" and stared into space.
The couple who were just trying to get to Denver from Chicago were on the app when it crashed. They were pretty relaxed, having been at Lake Michigan all week and in no real hurry to get home, but annoyed that before the app crashed, they seemed to have been involuntarily rebooked to Baltimore.
Bree curled into a ball and said "I'm over this shit, man, I Am Over It." Bree travels for her job, she continued to travel during Covid. This is unprecedented in her experience. She is an explosives expert with a neck tattoo. When this person curls into a ball it's hard to stay calm. Mike got up to walk the concourse.
Another family, two parents and two teenage sons, looked wound up tightly. Jim watched as the older son ducked around a corner with his phone (we assume to check the cancellation) and returned with the news. The younger son said something teenagey and innocuous, like he was missing his gaming night, and his mom came unhinged. She immediately lit into him at large decibels about how he had nothing to complain about because he didn't have a job he needed to get to tomorrow. She was screaming. They were given a wide berth as the other travelers all cursed their phones and looked around for someone-anyone-wearing a Southwest uniform. Suddenly Bree was on her feet and Mike looked at us and said "GATE 7, go to gate 7". Like the zombies were headed right for us and gate 7 had a zombie proof steel door we could all hide behind, or the eight legged freaks had breached the mall doors, and the mass exodus began. Three elderly women who were headed for gate 11 saw us moving out, and locked step with me asking if the flight was cancelled. I said "It appears so, we're going to Gate 7 for info." She put up her arms like a mall walker and said "We'll follow you then!"
At gate 7 I saw our chillax friends, still seated at the gate, and looked at the time. By then it was 7.40 and they were clearly not boarding for a flight that still said "DEPARTING 7:45 PM" on the board. "What's up?" I asked from my place in the middle of the increasingly long line. "We don't have a pilot," she shrugged. I shrugged back "We got cancelled, " and she shook her head "I hope you get home." I strained a smile back and said "You too."
While in line at gate 7, the family with the two small girls started chatting with us a bit. They were originally booked on the Tuesday morning non stop to Denver from Orlando, and then Monday she said the app just "Switched us to this flight, with no explanation. There is a reason I don't want a stop flight with children. Why would they just assume I was OK with it?" I told her the couple we had met who had been at Lake Michigan received a notice a few minutes ago that they had been unknowingly booked on a flight to Baltimore, right before his app crashed. The mom said they'd been put on stand by on the gate 7 flight, then transferred to the cancelled gate 11 flight ten minutes before it was cancelled. The girls were inconsolable at this point, quietly sobbing and eyes wide. I admired how hard they were trying to hold it together, to not go full on screaming tantrum right there. She looked at her husband and said "I can't, will you please do whatever here, get us on a flight tomorrow. I've got to put these two to bed. I'm getting a hotel." All very leveled and reasonable, I recognized her state immediately. Every mom knows it. You shift into neutral where there are no emotions, and all you do is visualize the tunnel you need to travel to get your children settled, fed, safe. They had left Orlando at 8 am that day. It was now coming up on 8 pm and their entire day had been spent in O'Hare. And nobody had been given any explanations, or food vouchers, or hotel vouchers. Nothing.
The poor, overwhelmed customer service guy at gate 7- I looked it up, he's probably making $15 an hour- got on the mike to tell us all to now go to gate 1. There are no more flights tonight, this one is full, please go to gate 1 to schedule a flight tomorrow. So, again, we all turned and herded ourselves down the concourse to line up, again, search for an outlet, again, and wait to hear our fate. There were two kids in their twenties right in front of us worried about missing their shifts at wherever they work in Denver in the morning. Bree and Mike were in front of them. Gate 1 had a sign that said BALTIMORE CANCELLED and NASHVILLE DELAYED. While we were standing there, the Nashville flight began to board amid cheers. The customer service employees were clearly deeply connected to this group, whose flight had been delayed for who knew how long, and started the celebration. The clerk stuck dealing with us was less than enthusiastic. An older woman, clearly confused and clutching a boarding pass, could not get any help from the clerk who was alone, trying to deal with a line of 30 people. A security guard ( I assume, his uniform was different) was able to talk to her and I do not know what happened to her, but I hope she got her questions answered and a flight home.
We figured out they're pushing people onto the Nashville flight, promising them a connecting flight to Denver from there. I'm beside myself by now, Stop Lying To Us. I looked it up online and I know the FAA straight up grounded Southwest for 45 minutes that afternoon, and the problem is not fixed. You cancelled my flight while I was on the plane with no explanation. You then sent me to an imaginary flight five hours later, at gate 11, where there was no customer service rep to help anyone. to tell us what to do next. This was the Fuck You Southwest moment. Then the clerk looked at me (this is our conversation, verbatim)
Me: "We're in the same situation, we need to get home to Denver."
Her: "We can put you on this flight to Nashville. There is a connection to Denver."
Me: "Nope. I do not trust your airline. I don't think the flight is real. You'll cancel it or delay it. We're going from here to Denver."
Her: "We have a flight at 12.45 tomorrow."
Me: "Nothing earlier?"
Her: "All booked."
Me:" Okay, we'll do that. Can we at least get a hotel voucher since we're stuck here?"
Her: "We are not authorized to do that."
Me:( I am editing out my impressive conjugations of expletives for those who don't like it when I cuss) "You are joking with me. You cancelled two fights, stranded me in Chicago and now are saying my choices are to fly to Nashville and likely get stranded there, or sleep in the airport."
Her: Blink. Blink.
Me: "So Many Expletives"
Her: Writing the customer service phone number on the back of our boarding pass.
Me: Walks away before committing a crime.
End Act 1
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