On the way back, however, things were completely different. We were delayed coming out of Rochester. Irritating but not surprising, and I had a 3 hour layover in Detroit, so I wasn't particularly worried about it. We got into Detroit maybe half an hour or so late.
My flight to Indianapolis was supposed to leave at 5:45. Shortly after I arrived at the airport, the flight was delayed to 6:15. Fine. No big deal. I tried to call the girlfriend (who was driving back from Minnesota and was supposed to pick me up at the airport at 7) to tell her we were going to be delayed. She didn't answer because her prepaid cell phone was out of money. I sent her a text message. Eventually, she pulled over at a McDonald's and used their free wireless to call me on Skype. Not the first time technology would let me down on this trip, but not the last. They kept delaying the flight because the plane was late coming in from Cancun. The plane got in, but then they didn't have a pilot and copilot. They finally put us on the plane around 7:30 because we had been reassigned a crew. We sat on the hot plane (they can't turn the engines on unless the pilot or copilot is on the plane) and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, the lead flight attendant decided to take us off the plane because they'd had no contact with the pilots since they got to the airport. This was at about 8:45. We stood around and stood around at the gate while the Gate Agent tried not to have to talk to any of us. Eventually, the departure time for the flight switched to 6:30 am the next day. We all went down to stand in the rebooking line. This was at 9 pm. This was also the point at which my cell phone decided that it was going to start the process of dying.
We stood in that line for almost 2 hours before we found out that we could have just gone up and scanned our boarding passes at this kiosk and it would 1) give us the hotel and food vouchers the airline had decided we could have and 2) tell us if they had rebooked us automatically. So I did that and got a voucher for a Doubletree Hotel. I called the number on the voucher and got a Crown Plaza Hotel, which was at a distance from the airport. The guy I talked to suggested that I call the Doubletree nearest him and see if they had the right phone number. So then I called them, got the phone number (on my blinking phone) and eventually got the number for the nearest Doubletree. It was a $35 cab ride away, with no airport shuttle. It was now 11 pm and I had a flight at 6:45 am. I stayed on the floor at the airport. It sucked. A lot.
The next morning (if you can call it "morning" if you have spent the night freezing your ass off on the hard floor under the bright lights of a major airport) at 5 am, I got up to go looking for a bathroom to clean up and noted that they'd taken our flight down off the board at our original gate. I went and looked at the departure board and found that they'd put it up at the other end of the airport. So I got breakfast and went down to that gate. I had only been there a few minutes when an announcement came over the intercom and told us to go back to our original gate. So we all carried our stuff back to the gate and waited. And waited.
The gate agent started trying to get things together to put us on our plane. She couldn't get the computer to pull up our roster and check us in. This apparently had to do with the fact that our original flight was dated the day before, which was pissing the computer off. You may be asking yourself (as we were asking ourselves) why they had not thought of this the night before and fixed it. The world may never know. The ONE gate agent they had sent for our flight was on the phone for a very long time with Delta's headquarters in Atlanta trying to get the computer fixed. For over an hour.
Meanwhile, we (the passengers) were old friends and were sharing stories about why we hadn't gotten out of there the night before. Apparently, the pilots we'd had assigned to us had originally been assigned to fly a plane to Salt Lake City and, on discovering that the flight had been canceled, went to their hotel instead of coming to fly our plane. DELTA HAD NOT TOLD THEM THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO FLY OUR PLANE!!!! Sorry about the all caps. I feel very strongly that Delta may be the most inept airline ever.
So we're still sitting there and the captain comes out and is talking loudly and angrily on his cell phone for like 15 minutes. We all understood his pain. He finally told the gate agent to just take our paper tickets, check them off by hand (or like they did 2 years ago before everyone had the fancy scanners) and get us on the plane. Which they finally did. It was now 7:45 am (that's right, we're now ANOTHER hour late). I texted the girlfriend that it was now (maybe) time to leave to come pick me up at the airport. Then we sat there and sat there for at least another half hour. While we were waiting, I was talking to the guy next to me. He asked me if I had gotten a hotel room the night before. I said no and told him about my attempt the previous night to get the free hotel room I was promised. He kind of laughed and said "I don't want to ruin your day, but..." and launched into his story of (successfully) finding the hotel that Delta REALLY meant to send us to. Which was called the Metropolitan. And was very close to the airport. And had a free shuttle. It had been a Doubletree at sometime in the fairly recent past, but SERIOUSLY? They got the phone number AND the NAME of the hotel wrong?!?
Anyway, don't fly Delta. They couldn't find their asses with both hands and a flashlight.
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