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Monday,
March 14, 2005
My poor baby
He was supposed to fly out to Atlanta last night for some site testing and installation -- the job had been rescheduled a couple of times, so he had a flight credit with AirTran and called them earlier this week to reserve a seat. His options were the 7:00 AM flight and the 7:00 PM flight, so he requested the 7:00 PM flight -- please note this because it will become important in a bit.
So he's wandering around the house yesterday, getting packed and all of his stuff together, when he decides to sit down and print an itinerary (AirTran was supposed to send him one, but they never did, which will also become important).
I was in the bedroom when I heard this scream of rage, and flew into the living room to find my beloved literally hopping up and down in fury. It turned out that the idiot who took his reservation at AirTran had booked
him on the 7:00 *AM* flight, not the evening flight, even after he had said, "So this is the last flight of the day, right?" Which meant that he was expected at a customer site that night, and his flight was ten hours in the past. Now, you have to understand that Lyndon prides himself on being absolutely reliable -- when he tells an employer he's going to be somewhere at a certain time, he will kill or die to get there by that time (and he's taken some interesting connections as a result). So losing the flight due to this massive fuckup by AirTran pissed him off to a degree that I've never seen during the course of our marriage.
While he got on the phone and reamed out AirTran, I tried to find him another flight that would get him to Atlanta in time for the cut, but by that point everything was booked. Meanwhile, the AirTran droid first told Lyndon that it was obviously his fault (the evening flight was actually at 6:57 PM or so, but you would've thought the surrounding conversation made it clear that he wanted the evening flight, and they never sent him an itinerary so he didn't catch it until today), then offered him a refund (they told him when he had to reschedule that they couldn't refund the trip, only give him a credit for another flight), then suggested that he head down to the airport and try to get on standby.
So he threw the rest of his things into a couple of bags and we hightailed it for the airport. As it turned out, AirTran overbooked the flight by 10%, so there was no earthly way he was getting to Atlanta that night. He managed to reach his manager and the customer and explained the situation, and they both said it was okay as long as he showed up the next day, but he was still massively stressed by it all.
I decided to take him out for dinner and a movie, hoping that some good food and lots of things blowing up would help his mood. It did help a bit (we at at The CheeseCake Factory and saw CONSTANTINE -- it was somewhat predictable but amusing, and I loved the way they cast Peter Stormare as Lucifer), but he was still "wound up like a milkman's alarm clock," as he put it when I dropped him off at the airport this morning. But the final irony struck this afternoon -- they canceled the test tonight. Which means that even if he HAD gotten there last night to put in some boards, he couldn't have done anything with them tonight. He's currently waiting on a go/no go decision by management to see if he should stay and try to test Wednesday night (they can't test on Tuesday night because the lines have to remain open for American Idol voting, of all things).
Bah. And by the way -- 'ware AirTran.