Saturday, December 19, 2009

Getting to Seattle

Well, that was a bit of a fiasco, but ended reasonably well. I made the highly regrettable choice to fly with a certain crappy airline, and it came very close to ruining the first leg of my trip by stranding me in Milwaukee and giving me a rage-induced aneurysm. I probably shouldn't name names, so I'll just call the airline "Air T." No, wait. That's too obvious. I'll call them "A. Tran."
I'll save the bulk of my rant for a strongly worded letter to the company once I reach a point where I think I can write said letter without excessive use of profanities, but let's just say the airline did everything in their power to make travel as frustrating and inconvenient as possible, while adhering to a customer service policy of being as surly, rude, and offensive as possible.
I was told at Logan that I should wait to fly out on Saturday because there was no way I could make my connection in Milwaukee due to delays, but I decided to take my chances going to Milwaukee (figuring that even if I was stuck I would be that much closer to getting to Seattle on Saturday). When we departed Boston, I had a 2-minute layover scheduled in Milwaukee and was convinced I'd be staying the night there, as were 90% of the other people on the plane. Conveniently, the ridiculously bad airline runs every single plane through Atlanta, which meant that every single flight was delayed by one to five hours due to weather and I was able to get on my Seattle connection.
A couple more atrocious customer service experiences later, I found myself on board surrounded by about a dozen hardcore Bucs fans flying out from Tampa for the game. (They travel to one road game together each year...) They were all pretty thoroughly awesome, and seemed to get a kick out of the fact that this Portland-raised chick living in Boston is a die-hard Tampa fan. One of the guys moved up to the seat across the aisle from me so we could talk more easily, and we proceeded to spend the next THREE HOURS talking about Buccaneers football. It was totally awesome. I don't think I've ever talked to somebody who is as obsessed with the Bucs as I am. It's so cool to be able to talk about obscure players and random moments in games that were played 5 years ago and have somebody know exactly what you're talking about. The band of rowdy Bucs fans definitely helped make up for having to deal with the many, many obnoxiously incompetent and rude employees of the worst airline I have ever made the mistake of traveling with. (Also, I'm now extra-glad to be flying back on a non-stop flight from Portland with the good people at Alaska. They have this weird policy of not treating their customers like crap, and it seems to work out pretty well for me...) Looking forward to four hours in the rain at Qwest Field tomorrow... Go Bucs!

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