Traveling bites
I just had one of the more painful travel days that I can recall in recent history.
I left the office around 5:45 to catch the 6 pm bus from Grand Central to LaGuardia, hoping that the bus would be quick and that I could potentially get standby on the 7 pm flight to Houston rather than waiting for my 8 pm flight. I get to the airport about 6:30 and rush over to the gates. Turns out the 7 flight was cancelled, so they're squeezing everyone from that flight onto mine. That's a bad sign already.
The 8 flight shows a delay on the board of 10 minutes. That's ok... but around 8, they announce that the plane has just arrived so we can begin boarding after the passengers de-plane and the cleaning crew gets a quick run through. We end up starting the boarding process around 8:30 so already we're behind schedule. Not to mention that there seems to be a lot of confusion - I assume due to the passengers that were rebooked to this flight from the previous one. The boarding process seemed to take exceptionally long for this flight.
We're all strapped in and push back from the gate around 9:15 pm. The pilot gets on the PA and announces that we may experience some delays on the runway as the weather has caused delays all day and there are a number of flights lined up in front of us. About a half hour later, the pilot comes back on and announces that flight control is extremely busy and can't give us an estimated time on when we'll be taking off or an exact reason as to the delay. The pilot's guess is that the weather in the southeast is moving in our direction and so the opportunities for take off are limited.
(side note - the passenger in the seat behind me is crying hysterically into her phone at this point. I think she's getting married in Houston this weekend, so she must have been stressed about getting there on time.)
Long story short, we finally take off around 11 pm eastern time. We sat out on the runway for 2 hours. What made it worse was that the guy sitting next to me in the middle seat had a fairly wide build and was working on his laptop. So every few minutes, he would jab me with his elbow as he was typing. He could have been more considerate about it, but from what I observed with his interaction with the flight attendants and on the phone, his attitude was pretty arrogant and probably didn't care that he was preventing me from sleeping. I started to just push back every once in a while when he jabbed me. Passive aggresive, I know. And I shifted around a lot in my seat to try and angle away from him, but that didn't work very well either.
Anyway, the jabbing probably occurred throughout the flight, but thankfully I passed out maybe 20 minutes after we took off. The rest of the flight went by pretty smoothly. I woke up as we landed in Houston 3 hours later.
Oh yeah, by the way, the flight crew tried to placate the passengers with free headsets to watch Big Momma's House 2. Whoooppee! No thanks...
I left the office around 5:45 to catch the 6 pm bus from Grand Central to LaGuardia, hoping that the bus would be quick and that I could potentially get standby on the 7 pm flight to Houston rather than waiting for my 8 pm flight. I get to the airport about 6:30 and rush over to the gates. Turns out the 7 flight was cancelled, so they're squeezing everyone from that flight onto mine. That's a bad sign already.
The 8 flight shows a delay on the board of 10 minutes. That's ok... but around 8, they announce that the plane has just arrived so we can begin boarding after the passengers de-plane and the cleaning crew gets a quick run through. We end up starting the boarding process around 8:30 so already we're behind schedule. Not to mention that there seems to be a lot of confusion - I assume due to the passengers that were rebooked to this flight from the previous one. The boarding process seemed to take exceptionally long for this flight.
We're all strapped in and push back from the gate around 9:15 pm. The pilot gets on the PA and announces that we may experience some delays on the runway as the weather has caused delays all day and there are a number of flights lined up in front of us. About a half hour later, the pilot comes back on and announces that flight control is extremely busy and can't give us an estimated time on when we'll be taking off or an exact reason as to the delay. The pilot's guess is that the weather in the southeast is moving in our direction and so the opportunities for take off are limited.
(side note - the passenger in the seat behind me is crying hysterically into her phone at this point. I think she's getting married in Houston this weekend, so she must have been stressed about getting there on time.)
Long story short, we finally take off around 11 pm eastern time. We sat out on the runway for 2 hours. What made it worse was that the guy sitting next to me in the middle seat had a fairly wide build and was working on his laptop. So every few minutes, he would jab me with his elbow as he was typing. He could have been more considerate about it, but from what I observed with his interaction with the flight attendants and on the phone, his attitude was pretty arrogant and probably didn't care that he was preventing me from sleeping. I started to just push back every once in a while when he jabbed me. Passive aggresive, I know. And I shifted around a lot in my seat to try and angle away from him, but that didn't work very well either.
Anyway, the jabbing probably occurred throughout the flight, but thankfully I passed out maybe 20 minutes after we took off. The rest of the flight went by pretty smoothly. I woke up as we landed in Houston 3 hours later.
Oh yeah, by the way, the flight crew tried to placate the passengers with free headsets to watch Big Momma's House 2. Whoooppee! No thanks...
posted by KC at
7:53 AM
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