Right now, I should be ten minutes into my flight from Philadelphia to Rome to present my paper at SECON. Instead, I’m sitting here writing this at home. When I travel, I’ve frequently been screwed by flight cancellations, lost bags, food poisoning, and various illnesses. This time was no exception.
The problems started last week when I noticed I had fraudulent charges on my credit card, which I needed for my trip. Fortunately, the credit union was able to cancel my card and overnight me a new one at no extra cost to me.
Yesterday I spent over two hours in traffic getting back home since I would be leaving from Norfolk.
This morning started out innocently enough, fighting with traffic while biking for two hours in Virginia Beach. The best way to deal with the jerks is to give them the biggest smile you can manage. A few rednecks in a black 4-door Toyota Tacoma yelled at me to “get the hell off the highway,” and then came to a stop at a light in front of me. I gave them the grin, and the guy in the passenger seat rolled down the window and stared me down. I swear he looked just like the old guy in the Holocaust museum shooting and I could tell he was just boiling with rage. Anyhow, I managed to make it back home alive and left for airport in the mid afternoon.
At the airport in Norfolk, the gate agents delayed the flight for an hour, leaving little time to make a connection. There was weather earlier in the day in Philadelphia causing a queue of planes scheduled to arrive there. Somehow, we got bumped up on the arrival queue into Philadelphia so they boarded us on the plane in Norfolk earlier than they originally said we would. We taxied away from the gate and then just stopped. The pilot announced that there was now a ground stop in Philadelphia and we would have to wait, probably from more weather. We waited and suffered in the heat for 45 minutes before the pilots decided to take us back to the gate. By this time, it was less than an hour before the Rome flight was scheduled to leave Philadelphia and there was no way to make it.
Going back to the gate was probably the best way to stop an even worse situation: getting stuck in Philadelphia with tons of other travelers thanks to the weather, since we would miss the Rome flight.
Calling reservations yielded that there was no way to get to Rome leaving tomorrow, even on other airlines. Leaving Monday even looks dubious, since most flights leaving then are overbooked. I can’t leave later than that since my presentation is on Wednesday morning, so there would be no point in going I told my adviser to try to get in touch with someone else attending the conference in case I can’t make it.
What a mess, but it could have been worse being stuck in Philadelphia.
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