When bad travel happens to good people
1:30pm - Jamie leaves the John Hancock Center and hails a cab for O'Hare.
4:10pm - Scheduled departure time for Jamie's flight to Pittsburgh. Gate agent announces a 90-minute delay due to snow flurries in Chicago.
5:50pm - Flight 4179 finally departs for Pittsburgh. Jamie strikes up a conversation with his seatmate, a DJ and morning-show host for a Phoenix Top-40 radio station.
6:30pm - Somewhere over northern Ohio, the cabin pressure fails. Some of the oxygen masks drop down, but we're instructed not to use them. The cabin keeps alternating between freezing cold and uncomfortably hot, and Jamie's ears keep blowing out. The Top-40 DJ is white as a sheet and clutching her armrests. The plane makes a 180-degree turn and heads back to Chicago.
7:15pm - Flight 4179 lands back in Chicago, where passengers are told not to worry about the fire trucks waiting along the runway. Jamie is reaccommodated on a United flight leaving at 10pm.
8:00pm - Jamie, the Top-40 DJ, and a similarly-delayed software salesman from Youngstown, Ohio, bond over *entirely* too many beers in the Admirals Club, then switch to the Red Carpet Club when they run out of free drink vouchers.
9:50pm - United announces a 40-minute delay to Flight 760, bound for Pittsburgh. The plane finally leaves at about 10:35pm.
12:05am (Eastern time) - Flight 760 lands in Pittsburgh in heavy snow. The brakes makes a strange sound, prompting a sign of the cross from the Top-40 DJ. Naturally, nobody's luggage made the transfer.
12:30am - Avis announces that it has "no record" of Jamie's reservation for a rental car, and provides him with "the only car we have left," a Crown Victoria that reeks of smoke.
12:55am - The Crown Victoria is rear-ended by a Pittsburgh city bus as Jamie attempts to find his hotel. There's no damage, fortunately, but it's basically the last straw, and for the remainder of the drive Jamie screams obscenities and flecks the windshield with spittle.
1:30am - Jamie goes to bed, wondering if he'll ever see his luggage again and wondering what he ever did to the city of Pittsburgh to merit such a welcome.
posted by Jamie @ 8:51 AM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Wow, man. Any one of those things by itself would be bad enough, but... wow. I hope the rest of your trip is at least slightly better.
On the bright side, at least you're not the one who paid for it.
oh my god! jamie, our seasoned traveler, i am so sorry. that might qualify as the worst travel day ever, short of an actual life threatening accident.
Welcome to the world of consulting travel. Now you have something interesting to share when everyone is talking about the "worst trip/ flight/ project/ rental car/ reservation snafu ever". Make sure you save this story for the end, because it's a good one, and you have to have proper story-suckiness escalation. I coined a phrase for it, "one downsmanship".
Over the summer it was rare that I got into Manhattan before midnight on Thursday nights.
Oh yeah, that sucks. I hope you slept well.
Ok, I gotta know... was any of that really worse than when they told you you had to go to Pittsburgh?
The real question is, where those Carnegie Mellon guys worth it?
And if you tell me you went to Pitt to recruit, I will have to point and laugh.
You know something weird? I actually kind of like Pittsburgh, based on what I've seen of it. It's very hilly and sort of Old-World feeling. Granted, I drove in at night, and I've spent the last two days cooped up in Carnegie Mellon's interviewing facility (don't worry Andrik, we're not at Pitt, although I have driven by their campus.)
My flight isn't until 2pm tomorrow; I intentionally gave myself some extra time to explore the city. So I'll have a better grasp then.
If I remember correctly, you could pretty much spit(t) on Pitt from CMU's campus. Also, if I remember correctly, those campuses are in the nicest part of the city. Then again I'm sure it's been cleaned up some since 1996, especially since Laz left. Plus I can see how the hilly could make it seem like some sort of fantasy land if you're used to Chicago.
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