I've decided to start an airline. I'm going to start an airline where we fly people around in the cargo holds of planes that transport steer manure. The flight attendants will be obese bulldykes who pass through the coach every twenty minutes to taser everyone and pass out live gophers as snacks. All flights will depart a minimum of three days late and will arrive under medical quarantine but without your luggage. As an added feature, my pilots will all be chronic alcoholics and they'll select their destinations at random. If you want to go to a certain place, you'll have to just get on some jet and hope it goes where you want to go. That, of course, presupposes you will get there at all, which often will not be the case.
That's the working plan for my new airline and I know…some of you are thinking, "That won't stay in business for long." To which I respond, "Hey, United Airlines is still in business." Given the option of theirs or mine, mine should be your airline of choice.
As you might guess, I had an unpleasant experience with them. Carolyn and I spent most of Friday at L.A. International Airport in the United Terminal…not, as intended, at the WonderCon in San Francisco. What happened was that we missed…well, we didn't exactly miss our flight to S.F. We got to LAX later than advisable but we still should have been on the flight.
Problem #1 in an endless series was that there were long, long lines to check one's baggage if you wanted to do so with an actual human being doing the checking-in. We could not have done that and made the flight, even if we'd arrived when they tell you to arrive. The only alternative was a bank of computer check-in kiosks…all part of United's ongoing and serious campaign to enable them to operate with a minimum of people to whom one can talk and ask questions and complain.
I'm rarely late for flights. Once in a while, it happens…and what usually occurs is that I can make the flight itself but there's some question as to whether my suitcase can. The person who checks my luggage warns me it may not travel when I do, and I elect to take that risk. The worst that can happen (in theory) is that once I arrive at my destination, I sit around at that airport and wait for the next flight, on which will be my bag. That, of course, would waste no more of my life than just waiting for the next flight on the departure end of things and — who knows? — I might get lucky and my Samsonite will get on the same plane. Sometimes, it does.
The computer check-in doesn't work like that. It won't accept luggage less than 45 minutes before the scheduled departure even (apparently) if the plane will be taking off late. By the time we got through the lines and to the computers — and the computers located our reservations, which took longer than it should have — we were 43 or 44 minutes from take-off time.
This should not have mattered. The policy at United, as it states on the ticket folders, is that your seat may be given away if you don't get your Boarding Pass a half hour in advance. We had ours the night before thanks to printing them out online. You also have to be at the departure gate 20 minutes before the flight leaves. We could have made that but we never had the chance.
What happened at the computer is a bit blurry but the computer system announced it could not check our baggage…and the next thing we knew, we were no longer on the 8:25 AM flight at all. We were suddenly flying standby on the 9:33 flight…and that might have been an acceptable alternative had there actually been a 9:33 flight. It was cancelled with an explanation something along the lines of "The plane for this flight from L.A. to San Francisco originates in Uruguay, and it's sleeting in Uruguay." One of those deals.
But it was okay, we were told, because we were automatically "rolled over" (they used that term and I had to admit I did feel "rolled over") to the standby list for the 10:03 flight. The problem with that was that all the folks who'd had confirmed seats on the 9:33 flight went onto that standby list — ahead of us. I think we were #152 and #153, which didn't look promising since the plane only held 138 people in the first place and already had 137 confirmed reservations. One person from the standby list made it on and we weren't among that one. I think this was the flight via which our suitcases travelled but we didn't.
It was like that all day. We didn't get on the 10:50 flight. We didn't get on the 11:57 flight. Flight after flight, we were standing by for a lottery we could not win. The order of the standby list kept changing — apparently, folks with a lot more United Mileage Plus points were given preference — but at no point were we within even the realm of "faint hope." A check of other airlines suggested no workable alternatives and, besides, our luggage had already flown United and would be waiting — we could only pray — at the other end.
Granted, airlines sometimes have to cancel flights but you'd think they'd have a better grasp of this situation since it only happens every hour or three. At any given time, the terminal is full of lost souls who arrived there thinking they had confirmed seats. There were a couple hundred of us trying to get to San Francisco via United and what I think annoyed me most was the utter disinterest in our predicament and the startling lack of anyone to talk to about it. I meant what I typed earlier about a conscious plan to limit the number of human beings with whom we get to interface. It's seemed to me quite deliberate, like someone at United said to someone else, "Hey, you know what wastes a lot of money? Having to deal with passenger problems! Let's stop doing that!"
I tried talking to various employees at various gates and encountered one or both of two problems. One was how every one of those folks seemed to be doing the job of about eight people. They were all frantic, rushing to get other people onto and off flights. One harried lady who looked like Cloris Leachman practically yelled at me, "I don't have time to deal with your situation." But the ones who might have had time didn't deal with my situation, either. The subtext was like, "Well, we're not responsible for the weather and we certainly aren't responsible if you were late…so you'll get there when you get there and it really isn't our problem!" The most I could get out of any of them was a directive to go to Customer Service, a misnamed department if ever there was one.
The line at Customer Service was not short and it was difficult to stand in it long enough to get to the front and to simultaneously be at the various gates where standby passengers were being called for possible openings. When I did get to speak with someone there, I got a lot of that "it's not our problem" attitude from a person who seemed to know less about the workings of United than I did, and who seemed to have picked up their brains at the Duty-Free Shop. Cloris Leachman had told me that if I didn't get satisfaction there, I should demand to speak with a Supervisor. When I didn't get satisfaction, I told the lady who wasn't satisfying me that I'd like to speak to a Supervisor, to which she replied, "He's just going to tell you what I told you." I said, "Well, I'd like to hear it from his lips." So a Supervisor was called over and before I said anything, before he even knew what the problem was, he announced, "Whatever she said is how it is." I asked to speak to the Supervisor's Supervisor but apparently, the Supervisors at United are all unsupervised.
What that woman told me there was confusing and useless. It pretty much came down to, "Just hang around until you get on a flight." I asked if there was anything I could do to make that a reality and she said something about buying First Class tickets if any became available (she couldn't be bothered to check and see if any were) and $700. I'm not sure if it was $700 each or $700 for the both of them but I was not inclined to give United Airlines that kind of money for any reason.
Thinking I was cleverer than I actually was, I tried phoning United Customer Service. This is not easy to do because no one at the airport would tell me the number and it was just about the only United number that wasn't on the ticket folder. I finally called the number for reservations and wormed it out of someone there. Upon dialing, I reached a fellow with a thick accent whose only interest seemed to be in repeating talking points that extolled the glories of the United Mileage Plus card. He had no idea what happens to passengers stuck in Standby Hell and no clue what to do about it. Finally, I asked him, "Where are you located?" and he told me he was in New Delhi. I asked him what he could possibly do for me from there and he said, "I could fill out a complaint and send an e-mail to someone in Chicago." Obviously, that wasn't going to change anything and I guess that's the whole point of it. You don't have your Customer Service phones answered by some guy in India if you want to actually provide Customer Service.
After way too many approaches to United staffers who hadn't the time or interest in our dilemma, one semi-sympathetic employee (there are always a few) told me that if I went back to Customer Service (yet again), I could pay an extra $50 per ticket and we'd be guaranteed seats on the next flight that had openings. Why no one had told me this earlier is a mystery but it may have something to do with the fact that so few people would even talk with me at all.
It was, in effect, buying our way to the top of the standby list and it seemed unfair but this was no time for contemplations of that variety. I waited another half-hour at Customer Service and paid $100 and they told us that we'd definitely be on the 5:15 flight. (When they told me that, I asked, "5:15 PM?" Because the way it had been going, you couldn't assume anything.) That was, of course, assuming that there even was a 5:15 PM flight. Carolyn and I spent a few more hours sitting in the food court eating Wheat Thins and Bugles and chasing them with that delicious $2.50 airport Aquafina water. And we actually — wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles — did get out on the 5:15 flight.
As you may have heard, United has announced that beginning later this year — in May, I think — passengers will have to pay to check more than one suitcase. A lot of people I know have announced that because of it, they will never fly United Airlines again. I think they have the right idea but for the wrong reason.