American Airlines

Here is my saga, my dear friends...

Step 1: I arrived at the Tucson Airport, aka the airport where you can arrive five minutes before boarding and still have a chance to buy a cinnabon. If the airport had a cinnabon. I got their at five am for a six am flight.

Step 2: Apparently bad weather the previous day in Dallas had prevented the flight crew from getting the required break in between flights. So our flight was going to be delayed exactly three hours. Meaning....

Although I was never flying anywhere near Dallas, not even passing over any part of the state of Texas, some storms there were causing me a three hour delay

Step 3: Which apparently is just long enough to cause me to miss my connecting flight to Detroit.

Step 4: Which, although there are about 50 flights daily between Chicago and Detroit, meant that I could not be squeezed on another flight until the following day.

Step 5: I decided to stay over-night with Jane. Unfortunately, however, my flight was supposed to arrive at 2:30 into Chicago, and Jane works until 9:00 sometimes. No problem, however. I call up one of my new Edgecorp friends, a guy named Nick Wiarda, who lives in Wheaton, Illinois.

Step 6: All is well. Until we start our approach into Chicago, only to be put into a holding pattern because of supposed bad weather at O'Hare. So. being the disobedient passenger that I am, I took out my cell phone and called my friend Nick. I told him what was happening, and that we were delayed because of bad weather. Now my friend was actually outside of O'Hare at the time. His response, "There's no bad weather here. It's not even raining."

Step 7: After several teasing announcements about our eminent landing in Chicago, the pilot changes his mind and says we're actually going to land in Milwaukee. There, he says, we will quickly refuel and fly back to Chicago. He says it will take about an hour.

Step 8: Two hours later we are sitting on the tarmac at the Milwaukee airport, no sign of any refueling tanks. Luckily, our pilot was kind enough to announce every half-hour that we'd be leaving in about a half-hour.

Step 9: After another hour, the refueling truck arrives. The whole process of refueling, taking off, and landing in Chicago takes about another hour.

Now I have only a few complaints...

1. Why don't airlines simply tell us the truth? There was no bad weather in O'Hare. They knew the entire time that there was only one refueling truck in Milwaukee and that it would take several hours tor refuel.

2. As far as customer service goes, the airlines are by far the worst. Nobody has fun when they fly. No one is satisfied. Everyone expects the worst when he flies.

3. A bottle of water would have cost me three dollars!