Who Needs A Flight Crew?

One week ago I travelled to Boston. It was actually a very smooth trip... well, mostly.

It started out with me heading to El Paso at 4pm on Saturday. My flight was scheduled to leave at 6:30 pm but it is about a 45 minute drive to El Paso and then security and all. After only having to have my hair patted down, I made it to Phoenix where I had a 4.5 hour layover. Yes, I did say having my hair inspected. Turns out, I have big hair. So big in fact that people readily think I could be hiding razors or drugs in it. Which I suppose is plausible.

It makes me wonder how many people they have caught through security with illegal substances pinned underneath the folds of their hair. I don't make my hair big it just is... I really try to tame it down but sometimes I can't. This is the third time I have had my hair inspected when going through airports so it has become rather routine. People do give you strange looks though as if saying: Man this dumb girl is trying to smuggle things in through her hair. Genius!

As I am sitting in the Phoenix airport, reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (which is an amazing book about the woman whose cells were taken without her knowledge and grown for years. They have been a help in many cures and medical advancements. Read it.)

Anyway... I'm sitting reading this when two teenage girls, their mom and dad come walking into the gateway. I have literally never seen people that have looked more like a tomato in my entire life. I mean every single bit of their body that wasn't covered by clothing was a bright, sickly red. I'm not exactly sure where they were coming from in the middle of February but it must have been somewhere warm and sunny. I just don't understand how you let yourself get so sunburned. Not even on just a portion of your body... the whole thing. It looked so painful I cringed every time they moved an arm or a leg.

But this was the highlight of my traveling thus far. I was surprised to have a very smooth, drama free flight. No screaming kids, no rude people, nobody trying to flirt with me. I have to say, it was peaceful. And then my plane left from Phoenix at midnight and landed in Philly at 6:30 am. And that is when all hell broke loose.

I had about a 2 hour layover in Philly and decided to grab some food (Au Bon Pain... yum!) before taking the shuttle over to the F terminal. It just so happens that the F terminal is in utter disrepair and probably shouldn't even be used until they fix it up but here we were waiting anyway. Our gate probably held about 10 chairs with a flight of nearly 80 people... which means people were everywhere. I'm pretty positive we were considered a fire hazard blocking all kinds of exits but it is 6:30 in the morning and none of us cared.

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 9:15 am and board at 8:45. Well, 9:00 rolls around and we are all a little concerned as to what is going on. Nobody from US Airways is near the gate entrance. We can't find a single person that works there and absolutely nothing is going on. The plane has been there for about an hour and the passengers have been waiting longer than that but we can't find anybody to let us on the plane.

Finally, somebody decides they may have a slight idea of what is going on and announces that the flight has accidentally been oversold and 10 passengers are not going to be able to get on this plane. Oh... and by the way, all flights to Boston are booked for the next 3 days. So good luck getting there! I don't understand how you oversell a flight. As far as I can tell, you can count the number of seats on a plane... and that gives you the exact number of seats on a flight. There should never be a case where you oversell seats. Who does that? A poorly run airline does that apparently.

After a good 10 minutes of people yelling and screaming... and people trying to convince other people to give them their seats. The hostility slows to a simmer and people stomp away extremely angry. But at least we have the seats figured out and we can be on our way to Boston. We're already late and I have an interview weekend I need to be at in 2.5 hours. So, I would really like to get going.

You would think all the problems would stop there, right? Nope. Not even close. Turns out US Airways is run by some brilliant people. In the midst of everything, they seem to have forgotten to book a flight crew. I may not be an expert in the airline business but I am going to go out on a limb and say a flight crew may be the most important thing to getting a plane off the ground. Please, correct me if I am wrong but I think it is pretty crucial. So, I don't quite understand how when setting up a flight you don't actually have a flight crew scheduled? I think people need to be fired for this.

After a good 2 hours goes by, meaning I am already going to be 2 hours late for my interview weekend, we finally get on the plane. I could have actually rented a car and been in Boston faster than when I actually got there. After leaving New Mexico at 4pm on Saturday. I arrived in Boston at 1pm on Sunday which is (11 am MST). That is 19 hours of travelling... in the same clothes... with no sleep since Friday night and now I had to go and meet/interview with people. Needless to say I was exhausted.

Once in Boston though, the weekend went splendidly and my flight back was amazingly on time and with very friendly staff. That's because I flew United on the way back. I even got to watch a relatively good movie on my long flight from Boston to Denver. And made it back to El Paso at an early 12:30 am.

To sum up the weekend:
I was gone a total of 58 hours.
29 of those hours were spent travelling.
29 of those were spent in Boston.
6 of the Boston hours were spent sleeping.

So technically... I only spent 23 waking hours in Boston and over the span of 58 hours I only got to sleep 6 hours. All of this culminated in me getting deathly ill. And I have been sitting on the couch for the past 3 days in utter agony with fluctuating bouts of fever and more sleep than I think I have ever gotten in my life. Reminds me of the days when I had mono.



This is my sickly life :(

 No more travelling for me until May! I've clearly had more than I can handle.