If you've ever seen the movie Roadhouse, you might remember the line that Dalton delivers to the team of bouncers when he takes over the Double Deuce bar. "Be nice...until it's time to not be nice."
You probably already know that Ron and I have very different thresholds of when it's time to not be nice. Mine was back at 11am when Max & Erma's ran out of cheeseburgers. Ron finally reached his 9 hours later in Atlanta when he was explaining to the Delta rep at the passenger service desk that Delta is required by law to provide us travel on a different airline if necessary when our flight delays are due to mechanical issues.
Ron knows stuff.
When she claimed not to know that law, Ron was nice. When she made him show her proof, he was still nice. When she tried to tell him that none of our flight delays in Dayton were due to mechanical issues, but rather the crew just kept showing up late...it was his time to not be nice. Everybody at that desk saw his eyes shift and Ramon the manager was paged to the area and I'm guessing security was on standby.
Ramon really did do everything he could, but flying into New Orleans was out and our only options available to us that night were to try our luck flying standby on a flight to Baton Rouge that was leaving at 10pm or if that fell through, to roll the dice with standby on a later flight to Mississippi. We knew we'd be renting a car somewhere. Time would tell if that'd be Baton Rouge, Mississippi, or if both of those flights fell through, we'd be making the drive from Atlanta.
Our luck must've shifted with Ron's eyes, because we made it onto the flight to Baton Rouge and before take off, he went online and booked a vehicle from Budget Rental Car that would be waiting for us at the airport.
We landed in Baton Rouge, picked up our bags that they forced us to check at the plane door in Atlanta which miraculously rolled out on the conveyor belt, and then we made our way to the car rental corridor where every rental desk was dark and abandoned, except for ours. Things were looking up. But the lady was like nope, we don't have any cars, sorry about your luck.
This exact scenario happened to us at the Dallas Airport on our nightmare trip to Texas that I referenced in part 1. How that played out was I loudly announced through tears that "I'M GOING BACK HOME RIGHT NOW!!" Ron's eyes shifted and a manager led us to an entire parking garage full of cars we could choose from.
But before I could burst into tears in Baton Rouge, the Budget lady told us that Enterprise might still have some left. We walked into the dark parking garage and found a tiny Enterprise booth and waited in line hoping they wouldn't tell us they were out of cars when we reached the window because then we'd be forced to tip over their little shed with them in it. Ron's eyes were still shifted and my eyes had been in a perpetual state of shift since Dayton so it'd be no problem.
Praise the Lord we got a car. Then we couldn't drive away because a light on the dash kept indicating...wait for it...a door wasn't closed properly. That's when I officially lost my mind and Ron jumped out and ran around opening and slamming every door on the vehicle before I could take matters into my own hands.
As you know, we successfully made it onto our cruise the following morning. While we still had cell service, Ron decided to check our return flights the following Sunday "just to make sure." And thank goodness he did, because somewhere along this nightmare, all of our return flights had been cancelled, and he spent the first half of our Sail Away Party sitting on our balcony screaming "SPEAK TO A REPRESENTATIVE" while another ship blaring the song Fireball passed by. He finally managed to get our flights rebooked and we spent the next 7 days cruising with our entire family.
Fast forward to 11pm the following Saturday night. The cruise was over and all of our kids who left that day were safely back to their homes, even the ones who drove. We were scheduled to fly home first thing Sunday morning. I was laying in our hotel room crying because I wanted to be back home too, but I knew we still faced a day of travel that would likely be disastrous because as one of my sons-in-law pointed out, I must be a travel curse. As if to prove the point, the hotel fire alarm started blaring for reasons we still don't know, nor do I care. We never evacuated so I'll assume it wasn't actually on fire.
We took off and landed in Atlanta on time, so I was starting to relax. We had 45 minutes to get to our connecting flight. The subway train arrived promptly, we jumped on, and the doors started sporadically opening and closing until a voice came over the intercom: "We're experiencing technical difficulties..."
You seriously can't make this sh*t up.
We darted through the malfunctioning doors, jumped off the train, and ran to our gate.
While waiting to board, we received a notification that I'd been upgraded to First Class.
Question for Delta- How do you put a price on travel PTSD? It's higher than one first class flight, I'll tell you that much.
Our Atlanta flight to Dayton took off on time and an hour and seven minutes later, we landed back at the cursed Gate B12. As I stepped out of the plane door, an attendant stood greeting us and said, "Welcome to Cleveland."
My head whipped around to face her and she laughed and said, "I'm kidding! I just like to see who's paying attention."
Lady, from my experience in this hell hole, the passengers are the only ones paying attention.
Ron submitted all of our receipts from that day to Delta for a refund for everything- hotel, Baton Rouge, rental car, chicken fingers- every.thing.
They rejected our claim.
Ron rejected their rejection, went to war with Delta, and won the full refund.
Because as Dalton says...
No comments:
Post a Comment