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May 10, 2006 - Wednesday

 The View From Atlanta, GA

This is supposed to be the View From Huntsville, AL, but Delta Airlines didn’t cooperate tonight. I missed my connecting flight here at ATL (by about 3 minutes, fuckinghelldammit), so now I get to write to you from Room 320 of the palatial (and really not all that bad if I’m being honest) Wellesely Inn & Suites hotel. For free, thankyewverymuch — not that Delta wanted to spring for it.

In a perfect world, I would have had about an hour and a half between flights when connecting through Atlanta tonight, giving me plenty of time to make my flight to Huntsville. But Atlanta got a little rain today, and when it rains in Atlanta Air Traffic Control loses their freakin’ mind and start diverting and cancelling flights. So my flight’s departure time out of Cleveland was delayed. First for 15 minutes, then for 30, and the final tally was nearly two hours. But still, if the flight had left when they tried to leave at the 2 hour mark, I would have made my connection. Close, running-through-the-terminal close, but doable.

But then the airplane wouldn’t start. I shit you not: they couldn’t start the engine. So they brought in an “aircar” that was supposed to somehow magically invoke a mighty wind that would huff and puff and blow the engine into starting. (But it probably wasn’t nearly as erotic as that sounded.) But the first aircar they got wasn’t a pro — couldn’t… um… “blow” hard enough. So they brought in the Big Momma aircar and she blew that engine good! Started it right up.

But it took half an hour, which ate into pretty much every second of flex time I had to dash from this flight to the next one once we got to Atlanta. And then when we finally got to Atlanta, they couldn’t park the freakin’ plane — our gate was occupied and we sat on the tarmac for another 20 minutes.

So the end of that part of the story is that when I finally got into the terminal and did my OJ run to my gate (the Hertz OJ run, not the crazy knife-wielding OJ run), I got there just in time to watch my flight leave. Last flight of the night, too.

Well.

So I’m stuck in Atlanta for the night. And I needed a hotel room. But here’s the thing about missing a flight and needing a room: the airlines don’t like to pay for it, even when it’s their fault. And they don’t have to pay if they can claim “force majeur” (aka “weather”). Which they tried to do in my case. Until I gave the nuclear smackdown to an escalating food chain of customer “service” agents who all tried to say “no” until I got to the top dog guy in the goofy red jacket. And I politely started my conversation with him by saying “I should warn you, I’m not going to take no for an answer” and then I proceeded to calmly explain that while my flight was indeed delayed by weather in the first place, I would have made the connection anyway if the freakin’ plane had started. Which was clearly a mechanical problem, and not weather. And that I still might have made my connection if my plane had been able to park once it got here. Which was clearly a parking problem, and not weather.

So to make a long story short, I am typing this in my comped room. And I get to go back to the airport tomorrow morning to try to fly standby on the 8 am flight, because I have 12 clients in Huntsville, AL who are expecting me to show up at 8 am tomorrow to train them. Fun, fun, fun.

Anyway, here’s the view…

Atlanta, GA

And here’s the room…

Atlanta, GA

And now I’m off to bed.


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