After sharing a cab to the airport with Alan Hack who is a great friend of mine and one of the nicest guys I've ever met I managed to leave my passport behind on the back seat. There's nothing like running after a cab with two heavy bags in the Orlando heat. With any luck I hoped that I'd get to the US airways terminal where Alan was being dropped off in time to retrieve my passport. Like the great friend that he is Alan had already picked it up and he handed it to me as I came running up. Thank goodness for friends!
Feeling like a bit of an idiot for the whole escapade I made my way back to the Delta airlines terminal and checked in. The flight to LAX was already scheduled to be late but I was pretty relaxed as I'd allowed plenty of time to catch the international leg home.
I headed up to the Delta lounge and bumped into Xavier from EuroDNS. I had a great talk with him and glanced up at the departures screen and saw that Delta airlines flight 1790 had been delayed yet again. I told myself to relax and take a few deep breaths.....then promptly fell asleep.
I woke up in time as the flight was called and headed to the gate. After boarding and taxing off to the runway the captain announced that we were "first in the queue" and should be departing shortly. It was at this time that the heavens opened and rain fell in a massive torrent that I haven't seen in years in Australia.
We sat at the holding point for the runway for about 30 minutes when we suddenly started moving forward. Hurray I thought, at long last we're about to lift off. Much to my frustration the engines didn't roar to life and we ended up taxing down the runway and taking a grand tour of Orlando International airport. Due to the storm the wind had changed direction so the whole airport had to be rotated around so that the planes once again take off into the wind.
We finally clawed our way into the air and ducked in and out of storm clouds. I must admit it that they were pretty impressive things. Thoughts of wind shear and other airplane disaster documentaries briefly flash across my mind but we managed to get out of Orlando safely (either that or I'm typing this in heaven and I don't know I'm there yet).
By this time I'm now two and a bit hour late getting into LAX so as soon as we land I bolt for the international terminal and the Qantas desk to get my boarding pass. I first of all find out that contrary to my confirmed seating allocation of an aisle seat at the front of the plane I'd been given a window seat at the back. In addition, the upgrade to business class that I'd requested had not been granted even though there were plenty of business class seats available. I was pretty ticked off!
Smiling sweetly at the check in agent I requested to speak to the supervisor who said that there was nothing he could do. Wrong answer! I then requested to speak with his manager and was told that I'd have to go to the gate to do that.....in other words.....get this nuisance passenger out of my face and pass the problem onto someone else.
I really wasn't happy at this stage. I fought my way through the security and bypassed most of it because my flight was leaving in about 20 minutes. By now I really wasn't in the mood for negotiating with the people in the mile long security queue so I talked with one of the helpful security guards about getting to the front of the line. Thank goodness for his help!
After running to the Qantas desk (I'm getting pretty fit by now) I found the manager that the supervisor spoke with. After calmly describing the problem he made a few calls and found out that the people that should approve the upgrade had made a mistake as the computer systems between Qantas departments hadn't talked to each other correctly (sometimes I really hate computers).
After about 5 minutes the manager had sorted the mess out and handed me my business class boarding pass. I was tempted to give him the biggest hug in the world but thought better of it and just smiled and shook his hand.
This is why I'm able to type this experience out at 30,000 feet. You see, business class has a power socket for my severely depleted laptop. I only hope that the journey in the car back home from the airport won't be as eventful as the rest of the journey has been!
Source: Posted on WhizzBangsBlog by Michael Gilmour -- Reprinted with permission -- May 26, 2008