Gadling

Dateline: JFK Airport (yes, still)

Previously on My Bloody Romania: We re-lived, at length, how my four hour late flight ‘serviced’ by North-motherf*cking-west on behalf of Del-$hiteating-ta had delivered me to JFK four hours late. I had been brushed off by JFK’s Del-$hiteating-ta representative, who had failed to see a connection between screwing my trip to Iasi, Romania and proffering even the most infinitesimal crumb of assistance or compensation. After being ordered to calm down in a tone that could only be summoned by a guy who didn’t just have several hundred of his hard earned dollars flushed down the crapper and had a comfortable bed somewhere in his immediate future, I’d been told to take my case to North-motherf*cking-west.

Meanwhile, where was my luggage? Apparently, when a flight lands at JFK after your connecting Del-$hiteating-ta flight has already departed, your luggage is taken directly to Del-$hiteating-ta’s cavernous storage area and haphazardly tossed into a pile. So when, after you’ve stood in line for yet another hour at Del-$hiteating-ta’s baggage management office, you try to collect your bag, it takes two hours for them to pick through the mountain of carelessly strewn baggage to retrieve it.

It was 11pm by now. As I waited for my bag, I was confidently informed that all North-motherf*cking-west staff had gone home and that I’d have to call their 1-800 line to inquire about where I might sleep that night. I did this. Long story short, North-motherf*cking-west has seeming plagiarized Del-$hiteating-ta’s ‘It’s Never Actually Our Fault’ guide to covering their asses. Not only was North-motherf*cking-west reading from an identical Blame It on Pixies and Gremlins script I’d heard from Del-$hiteating-ta in regards to my three missed flights, but in the meantime they were quite content, indeed righteous, about the concept of me camping for the night in JFK’s Terminal 3 rather than providing a hotel room.

I argued. Then I pleaded. Then I drew on an battery of words, phrases and gesticulations normally associated with Tourettes suffers and injured pirates, causing the lingering passengers waiting for luggage to clear a ten foot circle around me. North-motherf*cking-west maintained that God and the ATC were entirely to blame and no they couldn’t provide phone numbers to said entities to learn their policies on providing reasonable shelter to people whose $hit they’ve f*cked up. I was eventually forced to hang up, with further expletives and moderate violence, and return to the unmoving conveyor belt that would, maybe, produce my suitcase before 1am.

Perhaps as a premonition to the misfortune to come, I had not slept well the two nights prior to leaving Minneapolis and I was fairly certain that if I spent a sleepless night sprawled in a JFK chair that I’d go insane from either fatigue or wrath or a lively combination of the two. Even though it was past midnight on a Saturday night, I took a chance and phoned an old friend in Brooklyn who was not only home, but almost completely awake, who advised me to f*ck waiting for my suitcase, jump into a unlicensed car service, travel the 35 minutes to his home and sleep on his couch.

The next day I returned to JFK, slightly better rested, though unshaven, teeth unbrushen and, though still irate about the injustices and eventual out-of-pocket cash outlay necessary to right most of them, I was at least finally on my way to Iasi, Romania.

POSTSCRIPT: The Del-$hiteating-ta flight from JFK to Madrid left over three hours late due to yet another series of utterly avoidable mechanical blunders, ostensibly closing my window of opportunity to catch my flight from Madrid to Bucharest.

Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for further musings about the promiscuity of the mothers of Delta Airlines’ employees and why, if there’s a god, and there isn’t, the bastard loathes him so goddamn much.

Dateline: JFK Airport

I’m an hour away from Try Number Two of getting the hell out of the United States.

In a dizzying succession of tag team worthlessness, Northwest (heretofore, because I’m bitter, referred to as ‘North-motherf*cking-west’) and Delta (A.K.A. ‘Del-$hiteating-ta’ – rolls off the tongue, no?) succeeded in stranding me at JFK homeless, bagless and costing me no shortage of cash in missed flight expenses on another airline between Madrid and Iasi, Romania.

This fantastic misfortune was due to my flight from Minneapolis to JFK being delayed four times, causing us to arrive four hours late. It went down like this: First haze in JFK roped us into a gate delay in Minneapolis, then Air Traffic Control (ATC) at JFK decided that they needed to change landing directions, a lengthy process, to correct the visibility problem (so it was only one-way haze?), then since North-motherf*cking-west had seen fit to keep a plane with no auxiliary power in service they couldn’t start our engines without some kind of ‘air truck’ that disappeared the minute we needed it, then we were put into a holding pattern above JFK for reasons they never felt compelled to divulge.

On a strange and frankly dubious side note, while all incoming flights to JFK were delayed by several hours all day long, outgoing flights were curiously leaving at the stroke of departure (actually, the Madrid flight I missed left 30 minutes late, but in the We’ll-Get-You-There-Eventually summer of 2007 air travel, a mere 30 minutes late is hailed as quite a feat at most airports, and a modern miracle at JFK).

JFK’s genuine surprise and coping deficiencies with the haze that has been appearing there every morning about this time of year since the last ice shelf retreated notwithstanding, North-motherf*cking-west’s ineptitude sparked an inconceivable chain reaction of increasingly dire consequences that I was condemned to suffer alone. But let’s back up to the beginning of this snowballing clusterf*ck.

My troubles actually began four weeks ago when I rebooked my Minneapolis to Madrid journey (a delay necessitated by my wretched exhaustion) through Del-$hiteating-ta, only to learn while examining my new itinerary that the Minneapolis to JFK leg was being ‘serviced’ North-motherf*cking-west, an airline that I swore to never fly again three years ago after I suffered through five consecutive inexcusably effed up flights. This bait and switch irked me. Apparently, since North-motherf*cking-west has succeeded in alienating every frequent traveler in the western world, the only way they can fill seats now is to bribe other airlines to sell tickets on their behalf.

Before we left Minneapolis, I expressed concern to the North-motherf*cking-west gate agent that our delays would cause me to miss my connecting flight in JFK (and my connecting flight in Madrid and my connecting flight in Bucharest). That person, wielding a courageous lack of compassion, essentially told me to bugger off and call Del-$hiteating-ta. Del-$hiteating-ta in turn happily told me that it was North-motherf*cking-west’s fault and they would do nothing and refused to discuss it for one moment longer. And so it went back and forth, me playing messenger boy, until we took off with no resolution.

On the ground at JFK that night, I stood in line for nearly two hours with a crowd of seething, raw-nerved travelers that had also been stranded by the combination of four hour late arrivals and on-time departures JFK was maintaining. When I finally stepped up to the desk, I was coolly informed that the delay had been due to weather and since this was an act of God, Del-$hiteating-ta was not at fault. This enraged and spiritually offended me – I’m a staunch Atheist. In my faith (The Church of Potty-Mouthed Heathens of Minnesota), explaining something away that was largely a case of gross mismanagement as an ‘act of God’ was comparable to blaming fairytale characters (e.g. “Although I was physically and solely present and involved when the window of your car was smashed, the engine was hotwired and the car was driven into a river three states away, technically it wasn’t my fault, due to it being an act of Peter Pan. Amen.”).

Furthermore, since weather was the reason for the first delay, Del-$hiteating-ta took the stance that the delays by the ATC debacle, the broken plane and the mysterious flying of circles over Buffalo were extraneous. That pesky weather was entirely to blame and no amount of logic and reality was going to change their minds.

Del-$hiteating-ta booked me on the same flight the following day, generous seeing as how it was all Pinocchio’s fault, but they were of the opinion that they were not obliged to do anything about the fact that I missed my flights on Tarom Airlines from Madrid to Bucharest and from Bucharest to Iasi, as this was on an entirely different airline and therefore it was somehow up to Tarom to cope with a screw up perpetrated by unrelated halfwits 8,000 miles away. And anyway this was all North-motherf*cking-west’s problem, so why don’t I go talk to them?

And boy did I ever.

Tune in tomorrow for further adventures into indignant curse words and wholly fact-based libel.

Leif Pettersen, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, co-authored the current edition of Lonely Planet’s Romania and Moldova. Visit his personal blog, Killing Batteries, for further musings about sleeplessness, first-hand injustices he’s suffered and smarmy airlines that he’s building a lavish case against for a landmark Better Business Bureau inquiry.

Leif would like to extend special thanks at this time to Willy and Justin at Gadling for allowing him to curse freely and extravagantly.