Greetings and tired salutations, race fans. This is going to be semi-brief. Long story short: US AIRWAYS is falling down in the customer service department.
As mentioned in an earlier post, a coworker and I went to Philly and the Philly rep took us to DC two days ago ... or was it three days ago, and then to Hoboken yesterday. The idea was to drop us back in Philly in enough time to catch a flight back to Charlotte and then to Raleigh -our home base. The flight out of Philly was for around seven bells in the evening. We arrived at the gate with time to spare. The pilot did not. Repeat, the pilot did not show. Which begs the questions, "Do they have standby people or not?" I mean what happens if Cap'n Bob has some bad sushi? Surely this must happen every now and then. Eventually they flew in a crew from the greater Chicagoland area.
The upshot is that we got to Charlotte around 11:30. Here's a little trivia for you: The second largest banking town in the US of A has an airport that pretty much shuts down at 11:00 at night. Guess which one. We missed our flight and went to get a rental car... may as well drive was the collective thinking. "Sorry, sir, no one way rentals." Why, you may ask, were there no terrific examples of americano engineering and hubris? Because the week before last night took place, US Airways messed up and a lot of people became stranded in Charlotte. Of course, they rented cars and drove the cars one way to their destinations. Thus no one way rentals last night. No airport shuttles either because most hotels were booked. I will skip the rest of the night. Suffice to say, we ended up in Raleigh around 9:00 this AM.
I've had this standing Boston gig creeping up on me for some time. So, I was back at the airport in Raleigh around 10:40 for an 11:40 flight to Bean Town through, you guessed it, Philly.
I arrived in Philly. My luggage did not. The pictures above are poor but demonstrate somewhat clearly the utter chaos taking place at the luggage claim areas for US Airways in Boston. Those people represent approximately, oh, say seven or so different flights. The luggage puppies stopped mushing bags around my half way point of being there. They stood against their respective unclaimed luggage carts and told jokes about thumbs up butts and stuff like that. I can't say I blame them. The unclaimed luggage in front of the unclaimed luggage office was claiming almost all of the previously unclaimed carpet. They would have had to open the doors and stacked luggage on the cabs outside.
This, of course, lead to the the luggage puppies on the "other side" of the wall growing frustrated enough to actually THROW luggage out of their area and into the passenger luggage claim area. That's cool, man. Nice form. Do the Olympics have a luggage heave event? The luggage claim agent, when I finally gave up all hope, suggested that I go out and purchase a suit for my business meeting tomorrow. Wow! That was helpful. Did you have a team of monkeys working around the clock on that one? Unreal.
The other two photos are of the dangerous-tired-man-driving-and-taking-in-motion-pictures-of-the-teddy-williams-tunnel-in-beantown AND a cool zinc project in the great Fly Me To The Moon town of Hoboken, NJ. I'm just trying to keep it real and mix it up a little.
At any rate, I am extremely tired. I am going to bed. More later on all of this, but for now we will just assume that at least one traveler may be looking for alternative air carriers and is a tad bit grumpy.
Disclaimer: US Airways has been pretty good to me in the past. But these two back to back episodes suggest "suckiness" beyond the elastic limit of suck in general. This is only my elastic opinion and should not be misconstrued as gospel, religion, political belief, etc.
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