Started the first leg of our trip back to Europe Friday with a flight from Fort Lauderdale to Boston - or what we thought was going to be a flight to Boston...
Now both Steve and I have traveled for work and pleasure a great deal. We know that traveling has its challenges and that when travelling (particularly by plane), it makes sense to enter 'travel mode' as soon as you walk in the door of the airport. This is a zen-like state where you let the minor (and major) irritations of travel just wash right off you. You're prepared with books, laptops, food and drink so delays and other 'snafus' aren't such a problem because you have other things to do.
We have also been really lucky with travel. Even when flying several times a week over the course of years, the most difficult situation was sitting on the runway at Heathrow for about 90 minutes. Friday's US Airways experience made that seem like a mere niggle in comparison.
Problem with the plane, a broken air conditioning something or other so we got off the plane as soon as we loaded, but no problem the air conditioning in the airport was working just fine. As the hours passed, more and more passengers were rerouted to different destinations. We waited patiently. Our flight was at 11:30, at 4:00 we reboarded - yippee (or so we thought). We took off to Charlotte and after a quick load of more passengers we were supposed to take off again for Boston.
At the gate in Charlotte, the flight attendants told everyone to get off the plane and that the gate agent would inform us as to when we could reboard. (We should have listened for the plane door to slam behind us.) The gate agent didn't have a clue as to what the flight attendants were talking about and placed a call while we milled about. No, the plane was not going on to Boston and all of the people on the plane were going to be rerouted to other flights - go to Special Services please. Turns out there were only 23 people left on the plane and some bright spark decided to cancel the flight (for monetary reasons perhaps?).
At Special Services, Christopher G. pulled up our record and informed us we had been put on the 10:00 p.m. flight to Boston (we had arrived at the airport at 10:00 a.m.). He then mentioned it was too bad we couldn't go to Providence, because there were seats available on the 7:55 - "We can go to Providence!" So he moved us to that flight, wait listed us for First and gave us a travel voucher for a taxi to take us to where we were going. He was polite and kind and reasonable - a shining example of what customer service could be at US Air.
Nice flight to Providence and no sign of our luggage when we got there, for some strange reason it never left Charlotte!
The dictionary definition of civilised is:
"civilised - having a high state of culture and development both social and technological
Unfortunately our experience didn't have a high state of culture in either the social or technological fashion.
But, that is the state of travel today (you thought I was just having a travel rant, didn't you?!) and if your ideal lifestyle involves travel, situations like the above will be encountered - the travel experience is not a civilised one. You can become frustrated and angry by it (as many of Friday's passengers were) and let it spoil your trip. Or you can realise that travel often is uncivilised and prepare for it. If you were heading off into uncivilised and uncharted lands, you wouldn't head out unprepared, right? Consider an airport in the same category, uncivilised in its social and technological capabilities, uncharted in that your experience is anything but well mapped out and predictable.
I once read that happiness occurs when your expectations are lower than your experience: 'Happiness = Expectations <>
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