Here is what anticipation looks like.
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| What could go wrong? |
Anticipation doesn't know AirCanada.
Oh, Canada! our vast neighbor to the north, champion of universal health care, plaid lumberjack shirts, hockey, and whatever other cultural stereotypes I can shoehorn into this sentence, eh? I have friends in Canada. I honeymooned in Canada. Their National Film Board makes amazing animated shorts. It's a lovely country that really, really deserves a better flagship airline.
But we were, as yet, unaware of the looming disaster. The Artist and I sat in the terminal in Atlanta, blissfully eager, sharing blog posts and humorous memes, conversing on controversial, adult topics uninterrupted by any small person needing to go potty or lamenting the injustice of a universe in which his/her sibling gets twelve more seconds ipad time than he did.
The minutes ticked by. I checked the time periodically, growing concerned as no announcement of imminent boarding was forthcoming. We glanced at the desk where an airline employee stood, apparently unconcerned, shuffling paperwork and clicking upon a keyboard. 30 minutes before scheduled departure, there was still no plane at the gate.
Departure time came and went, as unacknowledged as a scrap of litter scurrying down a city sidewalk on a fetid breeze. My concern turned to annoyance. Our layover in Toronto was almost exactly two hours long, which I'd been told would be sufficient for the connection to Dublin, but didn't allow for much wriggle room. We were just about to approach the counter to make inquiries when boarding was finally announced.
Sighs of relief. We settled into our seats, shoving our stuffed backpacks into overhead bins. I congratulated myself on my minimalist packing; our carry-on-sized bags had been checked as planned, and overall we were remarkably light, my cumbersome purse replaced with a travel-wallet slung over one shoulder. I felt free and easy. Outside our window, the light was kindling to late-afternoon gold. The Artist leaned over to whisper, "Can you believe that next time that sun rises we'll be in Ireland?"
Famous last words. The plane stood firm, like a recalcitrant mule. People began to mumble and squirm. After twenty immobile minutes the intercom crackled. "Sorry folks, we're just having some mechanical troubles; the plane engines will not start, so we're going to have maintenance come and start them manually. This happened on the previous flight as well."
I thought, in exclamation points, about the implications of a jet engine that had to be "manually started". Was there an aircraft equivalent to jumper cables? What if an engine stalled mid-flight? Who was going to climb out there and start it manually?
Relax, I thought. If it were that dangerous they'd just ground the plane. Nobody on it wants to die, pilots included. Time is ticking away, but if we miss the connection, it's not the end of the world. They'll work it out. Stuff like this happens all the time.
Little did I know.
Here is what a sense of humor looks like, when you think that the worst that can happen has already happened.
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| It hasn't. |
But I get ahead of myself. The first flight was comfortable enough, once it was underway (after an hour of sitting on the ground with no updates on the status, and flight attendants that were clearly annoyed by inquiries about takeoff.) After landing in Toronto-Pearson, we had deboarded quickly enough. I had a faint hope that our connecting flight may have also been delayed, so we sprinted through the airport, frantically following signs because there were no airline employees in sight. When we did bump into a cluster of them, apparently entirely by accident, they knew nothing about which gate our next flight would be leaving from. Their first suggestion wasn't it and we doubled back twice, finally winding up in the right spot at the wrong time. The plane was gone. No surprise. Back to the customer service desk, and we got in line.
Besides the visible nine in the above photo, there were about 30 other people standing around, growing rapidly disenchanted with their travel options. It was shortly after we took this photo that the folks just ahead of us, a delightful group of Irish from Galway, informed us that they'd been waiting there for two hours. The little fellow with the bald head, who I mentally clapped a Bowler hat and green jacket on because he looked like a pub-crawler straight out of The Quiet Man, said that they'd arrived at the gate well before the plane took off. "T'ey wouldn't let us board," he explained, with the remarkable good humor of someone who can't quite believe their situation is as bad as it is, "because our luggage hadn't made it to the plane."
"But that's ridiculous," I protested. "They can always send your luggage later. That's what they have to do anyway if they lose it through their own negligence. What kind of excuse is that?"
"I t'ink t'ey were after giving our seats to somebody else." He shrugged. "All t'e flights to Dublin are overbooked. T'ere's not another one 'til tomorrow night, and t'at one's full, too. T'at fellow at t'e counter is missin' his niece's weddin'. He's s'posed to be givin' her away."
My sense of humor was waning by the second. We turned to the couple behind us, who we discovered were on their honeymoon, heading, eventually, to Edinburgh. She was near tears and he was fuming. Oh well, I thought, at least it's just a vacation for us. We're flexible. We're not missing any important events. It could be worse.
Fifteen minutes later, not a single person had moved, but there was a sudden scuffle of activity behind the service desk. A rep announced to the gathered crowd that it was midnight. "We have to clock out and close this counter now," he declared flatly. "All of you will need to go downstairs, through customs, and to the other service desk." Before this revelation could soak in to the stunned ears present, he added, "And another delayed flight has just come in from (other location). There are about 40 people on it that have missed their connection and they'll be heading to that desk too, so you're going to need to hurry to beat them there."
Nobody moved. Stricken dumb and motionless as stone, we stared at this outrageous herald. He avoided all eye contact as his associates began packing up their paperwork, and in a fraction of a second, stunned silence gave way to vociferous indignation.
"We've been waiting two hours!" "You're all just leaving, just like that?" "You're telling me we have to go all the way out, through customs, so we have to go back through security on the way back in?" "We've already been all over this entire airport tonight!" "Why didn't anybody mention this an hour ago?"
"I did tell you all this an hour ago," a different rep piped up defensively. She was roundly contradicted by the crowd and I wondered if she was thinking of a different night - perhaps this level of devastating incompetence was an occurrence so common as to be forgettable.
The little Irishman's face was turning as red as the crown of his bald head. Sensing impending mutiny, I turned to the Artist and we had a quick, almost wordless, exchange. Staying here and getting angry was not going to earn us a thing, as the stony faces of the retreating service reps made manifestly clear. We picked up our backpacks and headed for the elevator, followed closely by the honeymooning couple.
Our rush to the other counter was punctuated by more than a few profanities, explosions of outraged disbelief, and bitter laughter over ironic jokes about the situation with our temporary companions. We stumbled our way past customs officials, who with their customary (ha) lack of charm demanded the extent of our stay in Canada. Their curtness cost me, for a moment, what remained of my temper. "I don't want to be in Canada AT ALL," I spat at the one holding my passport hostage, "and I sincerely hope to leave it as soon as possible." She shoved it back at me without comment and jerked her head at the door. I thought grimly that customs should take congeniality lessons from this guy:
He can't clear you for entry, but he's friendly.
We arrived at the next desk with about ten people in front of us, from heaven-knew-where. Mercifully, this line was actually moving. When the group of Galway citizens arrived, I let them go in front of us out of pity. The bald man shook his head. "Would ye believe it?" he said. "T'at one fella led us to t'e elevator. When I told him my wife wasn't wit' us, he said, 'So?' and let t'e door shut." We goggled at him and he shrugged again, baffled. "She had to come down on t'e next ride." His wife was next to him now, along with the other couple they were with, all of them in a semi-hysterical state of shock. Tempers were mounting. The two poor girls at the service counter looked harried. The Artist and I attempted to recover, cracking jokes and getting people talking. When the Galway crowd found out we were going to Inisheer, they laughed. "Oh, be glad you're gettin' t'ere late. T'ey've got no power, for what...two days now, is it?"
We exclaimed, and they explained. The power cable that supplied electricity to the island from the mainland had been disabled in a storm. It was undergoing repairs and scheduled to be functional again within 24 hours. Still, close call. I laughed it off. "So, that would be romantic, right? Candlelight and lanterns and no hot water. Just living the way people would have lived there a hundred years ago."
"A hundert!" Bald Bowler-man threw back his head and laughed. "More loike twenty!"
It was after 1 a.m. when we got to the counter. The young lady there was pleasant and chipper despite performing what has to be the most stressful, thankless job in the airport, and we tried not to take out our frustrations on her. We waited. Fingernails tapped on keys. There was a mumbled phone call or two. Finally she leaned over to us. "I couldn't put you on tomorrow's Dublin flight, because it's already full. But I put you on the London flight, and I've arranged to have you transfer to AerLingus to get to Dublin from there. They don't like us transferring to other airlines, but I don't want you to lose another day of your trip." She handed us vouchers for a hotel, meals, and taxi service, and told us to pick up our luggage so that we could check it in the next day when we returned from the hotel.
We thanked her and wandered off to bag claim, greeted there by the ominous sight of the honeymooning bride openly weeping next to her exhausted-looking groom as they argued with an employee. The only other person there glared at us balefully as we approached the counter. He looked at our claim number and grunted. "Well, you can sit over on the bench. This'll take about two hours."
It was almost 2 a.m. I stared at him in disbelief. "Two hours? TWO HOURS? Are you *$%*ing kidding me?"
He grunted again. "I can't just pull your luggage out of the system and hand it to you. It'll get transferred to whatever plane you fly out on tomorrow."
The Artist, empathetic to my moods, cut in. "Look, we're just following instructions here. The girl at the desk told us--"
"The desk people don't know how luggage works," interrupted luggage guy curtly. "You don't get to pick up your bags on a layover. So you don't pick it up just because your flight was interrupted. It goes out on the next flight."
The words made sense, but his atrocious manner was holding a match to my last nerve. I snapped, and collapsed into a nearby chair in tears. The Artist tried to console me. "Honey, it's too late and you're exhausted. Let's just get to the hotel and we'll figure it all out in the morning."
I pounded the armrests. "I don't trust this airline to do #*% right now. I don't want to leave this airport without my bags. I'm scared we'll never see them again."
Tears are embarrassing and inconvenient, but they often prompt action when nothing else will. Luggage guy lost a little bit of his edge. "Hang on. I'll see if I can find out anything."
"You do that," the Artist muttered.
The hotel vouchers turned out to be for a place in Mississauga, distinguishable by a pair of high-rise buildings we dubbed the "Salt and Pepper".
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| Season to taste. |
There's really not much more to say about Mississauga. We slept, we ate the hotel breakfast (about a third of which was covered by our voucher), we listened to one concierge tell another to call Air Canada and inform them they had no more space left to take their refugees, and we bumped into both the Galway crowd and the honeymoon couple, who had somehow all been booked onto the next evening's "full" Dublin flight. The honeymooners had also been denied their luggage, and when they called the airline to inquire about its transfer, found that they themselves had been moved to a direct flight to Edinburgh without notice. Which was nice and all, given it was their final destination, but, you know, you kind of like to be notified. Once again, a brilliant move by AirCanada.
The call about our luggage never came - shockingly - so when we headed back to the airport that afternoon, we went straight to the check-in desk, where we were bumped back twice by an employee so that two large family groups could go ahead of us, because they were almost out of time for their check-in. I tried to feel sympathetic, wondering where that employee was the night before when our plane was leaving without 30 of its passengers. Still concerned about our luggage, we explained the events of the previous night to the employee at the check-in counter. He reassured us that our luggage would have been transferred as that was the normal policy, and said it would be automatically transferred to AerLingus in London - no need to collect it until Dublin. Alrighty, then.
We arrived at our waiting area, had a little dinner, and joined a crowd of several hundred travelers all waiting in a herd before the gates. Toronto-Pearson, that bastion of efficiency and organization, had two huge transcontinental flights, leaving at almost the same time, from gates directly adjacent to each other, at the end of a terminal where there is no room for the crowd to spread.We moved, like grains of sand in an hourglass, trickling toward the bottleneck. This, too, must pass. Patience...patience. Breathe like a Zen master. And...at last...
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| Freedom. Sort of. |
Ireland, I'm coming home. *
*It's a Garth Brooks song, look it up, people.
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