Given that I was flying out of Chicago in December, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my flight back home to Houston was cancelled due to snow. What was a surprise was that the snow was in Houston, not Chicago. Apparently Houston had been hit by a freak cold snap, resulting in an inch or so of snow. This may not sound like a lot, but for a city that has no real need of snow plans, it is almost on par with a disaster. (Hurricanes we can cope with, but itty-bitty snowflakes? Whoa!) So schools were let out early (which just causes more problems as working parents need to get out of work early or arrange someone to pick up their kids), my son’s camping weekend with the Scouts was cut short (they left the next day, after the thaw), and work cancelled its annual party, scheduled for that night.
My flight being cancelled was particularly annoying as it was the last flight of the day from Midway (about 5 minutes from the plant) back to Houston Hobby Airport. At least Southwest let me know a couple of hours before the flight, rather than just doing their usual trick of only announcing delays once you are at the airport. Unfortunately, they said that the next flight they could put me on was at 1pm the next day (Saturday), and they wouldn’t pay for a hotel as they aren’t liable for the weather. Pah. So I cancelled that flight, and managed to get a flight with Continental. Problem was that it was from O’Hare, which is the other side of the city. It was also an hour earlier than my original flight, so I had just over an hour to get there, or risk being stranded in Chicago overnight, and having to sleep in my rental car.
I tried racing over to O’Hare, but the rush-hour traffic jams put a stop (literally) to that. But at least being stuck in a traffic jam gave me the opportunity to call the car rental company and tell them that their car would be left at a different airport (they were surprisingly OK with it), and check in for my flight on-line (or at least on-BlackBerry). Checking in online is a great timesaver, but you still need to print your boarding pass. If you’re checking in via phone, you need to find a kiosk at the airport and print it from there. But here’s where Continental outdid themselves in their tech-savviness, by giving you the option to display a QR (2D) barcode (see last post) on your phone, and just have that scanned at the airport. Smart!
Unfortunately, Airport Security aren’t quite so tech-savvy. I approached the security line, and smugly waved my barcode-displaying BlackBerry at them, only to be told by the officer that this was not accepted, and they needed a paper copy. So I needed to go to a Continental kiosk to print it. Problem was, I was at Terminal 2, and Continental check-in is at Terminal 1. So I had to back up, get on the stupid little train to Terminal 1, print my boarding card, get back on the stupid little train again, and wave said boarding card at the security officer (who was a different one to the one who first turned me away, so I wasn’t able to make any snarky comments to them). I finally made it to the gate just in time to be the last person boarding the plane. (And used the barcode on my BlackBerry, and not the paper boarding card in my back pocket, just because I could. Worked, too!)
As I settled into my seat, they announced over the tannoy “Welcome on our flight to Houston George Bush Airport”. Hold on, I thought. My car is parked at Houston Hobby Airport… Great! That’s like 30 or 40 miles away, about the difference between Gatwick and Heathrow, in England. So once I landed in Houston, I had to get a taxi down to Hobby (via Surlycabs who couldn’t figure out why both the pick-up and drop-off points were airports), to pick up my car. Thereby losing the hour I’d made up by getting an earlier flight…
And then when I got to my car I realized why the cold snap in Houston was such a disaster, as I had half an inch of ice (ice, not snow…) on my car, which I had to prise off with a credit card, as I had no ice-scraper in my car (why would you need one, in a city where the temperature is above 25 degrees C for 95% of the year?). Still, the car started first time, which was a thankful miracle. And I hadn’t lost my keys this time, which was lucky (last time I did that I had to rent a car just to drive home to pick up my spare keys, and then drive back and pick my car up). So not all bad news.
Needless to say, I got home late, tired, cold, and thoroughly pissed off. (I’m sure George Clooney’s latest movie (Up In The Air) captures this perfectly…) Thankfully, it was my last trip to Chicago in a while. Next week, I’m flying to Japan. What could possibly go wrong, there??
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