You think getting on a plane and going somewhere would be a good time, but you’d be wrong. After the novelty factor wears off - and it wears off pretty quick - it’s much more of a pain than anything else.

Take this past Monday for example. I had to get up far too early to get to downtown Chicago for an all day meeting. That actually went pretty smoothly. But after the meeting I had to head back to the airport to come to my typical stomping grounds of Cleveland. This was not fun for a couple reasons: 1) I didn’t get to hang out in the city at all really (and it’s my favorite city too) and 2) O’Hare is the worst. To make matters worse I was flying out on United and it seems whenever I fly on United from O’Hare there are problems.

This time was no exception. The flight is delayed initially because it arrived late. Then they board us. Planes are hot and awful typically while you’re boarding. So, we’re sitting there. And sitting there… And sitting there… And the air isn’t coming on, and it’s unpleasant. Eventually we find out that the plane is for lack of a better term broken and that they can’t get the engines started. But sit tight! They ordered a part and we should be on our way in 30 minutes and also they were going to hook up the aux AC unit at the gate to cool us off.

10 minutes later we find that the aux AC unit at the gate is also broken. At this point it must be about 95 degrees in there. 20 minutes after that they tell us that the problem is more severe than they thought. We sit there some more, then they make us get off the plane. We stand around for 45 minutes, then they say “Hooray it’s fixed!” and they reboard us. Then they can’t get a crew to push the plane back from the gate. By the time I got to my hotel in Cleveland it was 1:30 in the morning. Nothing like a 20 hour work day…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 at 10:21 am and is filed under Travel and tagged with . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.