I haven’t seen something like that in 20 years.
I’ve had my share of truly horrible airport and airline stories, including one that involved lighting striking an air tower, sleeping in the airport lounge, paying $100 for a cab ride to some podunk North Carolina city, and walking into a conference room with my suitcase rolling behind me.
This one is not that bad, not even close. In fact, it has a happy ending. Not SUPER happy, since I would have liked a nonstop flight to London instead of that layover in Boston, but easy come easy go, or something like that.
So anyway, I had just boarded my plane at LAX. The minute I sat down, the captain announces that because of weather problems near the Great Lakes area, they were being asked to delay our flight by an hour.
I panicked. My connecting flight to London was supposed to depart from Boston exactly 65 minutes after my flight to Boston landed, which meant that I would have to spend a night there.
I immediately got on the phone to American Airlines, and I have to say that of the three different times I called them in a span of 10 minutes, two of the customer service agents were super duper helpful. Understood my urgency but were really calm. Not like the dimwitted person I got the first time I called.
After I explained the situation, I was on the verge of getting transferred to a nonstop flight from LAX to London leaving that same day. PERFECT. I was already imagining taking the shuttle back to Hollywood and having lunch with CD before the new flight.
Just when the kind woman put me on hold for a moment, the captain announced that we could still use our cellphones but we would be going to the tarmac to wait out the delay. And then the plane started rolling, taking with it my dream of making it to London on time.
That is when I propelled myself out of my window seat and ran past my bewildered neighbors and first class to the captain’s cockpit, all the while shouting desperately, “CAN I GET OFF THE PLANE? I NEED TO GET OFF THE PLANE!”
After a really dramatized explanation from me, the captain agreed to open the doors again, and suddenly there were four flight attendants all shooing me out.
EXCEPT. Just as I took one step out the plane, the customer service angel who I was prepared to hug if she had been in front of me came back from hold and asked, “Wait, you’re already on the plane?”
“There’s nothing I can do if you’re already checked in and your baggage is on the plane. You have to just take it.”
When she said that, I immediately scooted back into the plane, much to the confusion of the flight attendants and captain, who, mind you, I had just convinced to reopen the doors by describing in utter urgency the NEED for me to catch this other flight to London.
Because I could not accept the agent’s answer just like that, I started to do the super annoying thing of trying to communicate verbally with the person on the phone while simultaneously trying to demonstrate through facial expressions what I was hearing to the FOUR people looking at me with quizzical and slightly irritated looks.
In the end, I slinked back to my seat.
I was so busy being embarrassed that I did not expect how many people were concerned about me missing that flight.
Towards the end of the ride, a flight attendant came to tell me personally that we would arrive on time to catch my next flight. Then later, they asked over the loudspeaker for passengers to let people with connecting flights to London leave the plane first. A little bit later, they announced that the flight to London was leaving at a gate next door to the one we would be landing at.
When people around me heard that, they cheered. Seriously. “It turned out perfectly! We were all worried about you,” one woman said.
About my earlier attempt to eject myself from the plane, one man added gleefully, “I haven’t seen something like that in 20 years. It was great.”
