Not only was I MIA last week, but so was some of the travel service I was stuck with.  Please allow me to explain. 

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the Arctic ISA show in Anchorage, AK.  It was only a couple days, and I was supposed to return to my home (near Philadelphia) around dinner time Friday evening, well that was the plan, until old Mother Nature intervened.  As some of you might recall, last weekend the N.E was covered with a blanket of snow and ice.  I soon found myself stuck in the Phoenix airport, with no hope of returning to Philadelphia until Tuesday of next week (at least that’s what the ticket agent told me). 

While I understand you can’t blame Mother Nature, what we can do is at least train our customer service representatives to deal with it.  I sort of felt sorry for the ticket agents as they made periodic announcements that provide no resolve for us stuck passengers.  I tried an emergency call to my corporate travel agent, only to find out all weekend travel related calls are re-routed to Bangalore, India (I just hung up on the nice man with the thick accent) 

To add insult to injury, and since I was determined to get home for the weekend (Saturday was St. Paddy’s day), I figured I would try my luck flying standby the very next morning.  After missing the first oversold flight to Philly, I got lucky enough to get a middle row seat in the back of the plane to Washington DC departing at 8:45am (or so I thought).  This turned out to be the flight from....a hot evil place…

To make a long story short, after changing planes 3 times (yes, the first 2 were broken) we finally left Phoenix about 10hrs later.  The plane we were on was also limping without a working middle fuel tank (so we had to stop over in KC for a midnight fuel run).  Needless to say, I spent the better part of Saint Paddy’s day on a plane with a boy celebrating his 10^th birthday.  We had no cake or green beer (it was a bad day). 

I wrote a letter to the airline depicting the day’s events.  Sure the weather started the event, but their lack of proper maintenance turned a bad day into pure misery.  I’ll keep you posted on what they respond with.

Stay tuned.