When you are stuck in a hotel, or worse yet, still wandering from Asiana personnel (which aren't actual there, because they have all gone home) to United personnel, while stumbling through the disbelief that you actually missed your flight, you think back to all the ironic moments that could have turned everything around. I remember showing Jackie our itinerary, which her dad and printed out for us in the morning, and asking if we needed it now that we had out tickets. No? Yeah, I didn't think so either - trash (actually recycled, so that wasn't a worst case scenario I guess). I remember the irony of walking through the airport when we just landed and telling Jackie that I prefer a long layover to a "flash" layover - at least you can't miss your plane. Worst of all though is all the details that just didn't seem to line up. The flight time was a little off (37min difference), there was no gate number or flight number on our tickets, and we were making a stop in Japan on the way to Seoul, which we didn't remember. Jackie actually went ahead and asked a slightly distracted United attendant about the stop over in Japan. She showed her our boarding passes.
"So we're stopping in Japan?"
"Yes."
Well she was wrong. We weren't stopping in Japan. The United flight leaving from Terminal 1, Gate 17, was stopping in Japan and it was the only flight to Seoul on the departure board, but we were actually supposed to be flying straight to Seoul out of Terminal 5, Gate who-the-fuck-knows. We found this out after the "beep-beep" . . . "beep-beep" of our boarding passes being scanned.
"This isn't the right boarding pass." A United personnel informed us.
They took a closer look.
"This is Asiana. See-" She pointed out a small "oz" on the boarding pass.
Run. There was no way we could make it in time. Our flight was supposed to take off at 12:00; it was already past 12:00. We were in fucking Terminal 1 and we had to get to Terminal 5. Follow the signs. Panic - why are we out of security? Will we have to go through security again? These GOD DAMN BAGS! Up the escalator, over the road, and back down an escalator. On a train. Where the fuck is Terminal 5 in the O'Hare airport?
Click, click, click. the train felt like it was a child's roller coaster. No speed, it just slowly plodded along, a heifer out to graze. It was four carts on a what look like wooden tracks. Oh, there's was a slight bend in the tracks and the train started to lean, following the bank - hands over your head . . . .woooooo. Finally, Terminal 5. Heading towards security.
It's gone.
We don't even get through security. That's when the fog sets in.
We've made over a dozen international flights between the two of us. We've caught last minuet rides back from Timbuktu, Mali - but we just failed.
There's no one at the Asiana desk. We're informed that they have left for they day and wont be back until the morning. We're told to go talk to United that they need to fix this. But the people telling us don't know that United got us to O'Hare on time. Yes, they did give us bad information, but is that going to show up in their system? I doubt it.
Now we are standing in line at United International flight's desk, back in Terminal 1. A woman of Korean decent from Minnesota and her two little girls step up to the counter in front of us. Jackie and I started to listen to the woman relate her problem, well our problem actually.
We stepped up to the counter next to her and reinforced her story with our own. We were misinformed by a United representative also. Yes, we were partly to blame, because it is our responsibility to know what gate to be at in what terminal, but a United personnel had told us we were at the right place, after looking at our boarding passes. And apparently we weren't the only ones misinformed.
The nice woman at the desk commiserated with us. She made a phone call. No, nothing could be done. They couldn't reissue a ticket because it was all done through Asiana. They had no control over the matter. They were sorry, but there was nothing that could be done. We needed to talk to Asiana.
"There isn't anyone at the Asiana desk," we told them. We NEED to figure something out. "We need to be on tomorrow's flight."
Finally we asked for a manager. We waited. We waited some more. The personnel made a call. A new manager was going to come down to talk to us - we never found out what happened to the first one.
She was a bigger black woman. With her hair slicked back she looked like nothing but business as she got our story from the woman we had originally talked to, ignoring us until she had figured out what our story was.
I don't remember the first part of our conversation, but I believed it boiled down to us needing to call Asiana, because nothing could be done at all by United. They couldn't reissue our tickets; they couldn't do anything at all, because the tickets were originally issued through Asiana. She was sorry.
I'm not good with these things. I take it at face value. It made sense they couldn't reissue tickets. Jackie, however, is different. You might have just met Jackie this year or maybe you've known Jackie for years now without seeing her smile fall. Working through the burn on a Little 500 bike, or just chilling, she has a reputation for always, I mean ALWAYS, smiling. If you've not seen this smile fade, it's for the better. The soft lips and big tears in her eyes will wring out your heart, especially if it's your fault.
The motherliness began to ooze out of the manager. As Jackie stood there fighting back her own tears and frustration with how fucked up everything was and trying to explain that we were moving to Thailand; that we had to get there. We had to be on the next flight. She had a contract, she could lose her job, everything . . .
We got comped a hotel room at the Hilton and two vouchers for food. We received "Verification of Delay Forms" in hopes that maybe they would be helpful when we dealt with Asiana. If she could have put us on a plane I'm positive she would have. Jackie had transformed her into the warmest person behind a desk I have ever met.
We got the number to Asiana. We hauled our stuff to the Hilton got set up in a room and left a credit card down stairs so we could make outgoing calls at a dollar a call.
Showers, more disbelief, and dinner.
It would just hit us - we missed our fucking flight. There would be a calm and then it would hit us again.
I started making calls. Asiana told us we needed to re-book through our travel agent. Vayama said sure they would do it but need a reservation code from Asiana. Asiana said they didn't know what the fuck Vayama had been smoking. Vayama tried to get me to call Asiana again, all of this costing a dollar a every time I hung up the phone. No. I put on my stern voice, it's funny how we have voices for moments like this. So Vayama called Asiana. It was going to cost us between 500 and 600 dollars, given the fees and the current difference in prices.
Well, she would write an e-mail to her supervisors about the Delay Verification Forms we received and maybe they could wave some of the fees. Oh, and the ticket would be for the 26th.
It looks like we were stuck in Chicago. We looked for new flights online, something that left before the 26th. Maybe we could just buy a new ticket for a little bit more and get to Phuket. Jackie was supposed to sign her contract on the 25th and start work on the 29th.
We got in contact with Rob, a good friend, who was willing to put us up in Chicago, while we waited for our new possible departure date. It was hard to make the best of the situation, because there wasn't anything concrete about the situation. If we knew it was going to cost X amount of dollars and we would be on flight X then we could start to adjust: cry about having lost any financial padding that we might have had for the trip and then move on, but as it was nothing was certain. Vayama stopped answering their phone and I still hadn't gotten word from them about waving some of the fees.
So we hung out, stopped in at the pool, made more and more disheartening jokes about what fuck ups we were and then called it a night. We'd just have to get up early in the morning and run over to Asiana and hope that we could get on standby, but we already knew it was a booked flight.
"So we're stopping in Japan?"
"Yes."
Well she was wrong. We weren't stopping in Japan. The United flight leaving from Terminal 1, Gate 17, was stopping in Japan and it was the only flight to Seoul on the departure board, but we were actually supposed to be flying straight to Seoul out of Terminal 5, Gate who-the-fuck-knows. We found this out after the "beep-beep" . . . "beep-beep" of our boarding passes being scanned.
"This isn't the right boarding pass." A United personnel informed us.
They took a closer look.
"This is Asiana. See-" She pointed out a small "oz" on the boarding pass.
Run. There was no way we could make it in time. Our flight was supposed to take off at 12:00; it was already past 12:00. We were in fucking Terminal 1 and we had to get to Terminal 5. Follow the signs. Panic - why are we out of security? Will we have to go through security again? These GOD DAMN BAGS! Up the escalator, over the road, and back down an escalator. On a train. Where the fuck is Terminal 5 in the O'Hare airport?
Click, click, click. the train felt like it was a child's roller coaster. No speed, it just slowly plodded along, a heifer out to graze. It was four carts on a what look like wooden tracks. Oh, there's was a slight bend in the tracks and the train started to lean, following the bank - hands over your head . . . .woooooo. Finally, Terminal 5. Heading towards security.
It's gone.
We don't even get through security. That's when the fog sets in.
We've made over a dozen international flights between the two of us. We've caught last minuet rides back from Timbuktu, Mali - but we just failed.
There's no one at the Asiana desk. We're informed that they have left for they day and wont be back until the morning. We're told to go talk to United that they need to fix this. But the people telling us don't know that United got us to O'Hare on time. Yes, they did give us bad information, but is that going to show up in their system? I doubt it.
Now we are standing in line at United International flight's desk, back in Terminal 1. A woman of Korean decent from Minnesota and her two little girls step up to the counter in front of us. Jackie and I started to listen to the woman relate her problem, well our problem actually.
We stepped up to the counter next to her and reinforced her story with our own. We were misinformed by a United representative also. Yes, we were partly to blame, because it is our responsibility to know what gate to be at in what terminal, but a United personnel had told us we were at the right place, after looking at our boarding passes. And apparently we weren't the only ones misinformed.
The nice woman at the desk commiserated with us. She made a phone call. No, nothing could be done. They couldn't reissue a ticket because it was all done through Asiana. They had no control over the matter. They were sorry, but there was nothing that could be done. We needed to talk to Asiana.
"There isn't anyone at the Asiana desk," we told them. We NEED to figure something out. "We need to be on tomorrow's flight."
Finally we asked for a manager. We waited. We waited some more. The personnel made a call. A new manager was going to come down to talk to us - we never found out what happened to the first one.
She was a bigger black woman. With her hair slicked back she looked like nothing but business as she got our story from the woman we had originally talked to, ignoring us until she had figured out what our story was.
I don't remember the first part of our conversation, but I believed it boiled down to us needing to call Asiana, because nothing could be done at all by United. They couldn't reissue our tickets; they couldn't do anything at all, because the tickets were originally issued through Asiana. She was sorry.
I'm not good with these things. I take it at face value. It made sense they couldn't reissue tickets. Jackie, however, is different. You might have just met Jackie this year or maybe you've known Jackie for years now without seeing her smile fall. Working through the burn on a Little 500 bike, or just chilling, she has a reputation for always, I mean ALWAYS, smiling. If you've not seen this smile fade, it's for the better. The soft lips and big tears in her eyes will wring out your heart, especially if it's your fault.
The motherliness began to ooze out of the manager. As Jackie stood there fighting back her own tears and frustration with how fucked up everything was and trying to explain that we were moving to Thailand; that we had to get there. We had to be on the next flight. She had a contract, she could lose her job, everything . . .
We got comped a hotel room at the Hilton and two vouchers for food. We received "Verification of Delay Forms" in hopes that maybe they would be helpful when we dealt with Asiana. If she could have put us on a plane I'm positive she would have. Jackie had transformed her into the warmest person behind a desk I have ever met.
We got the number to Asiana. We hauled our stuff to the Hilton got set up in a room and left a credit card down stairs so we could make outgoing calls at a dollar a call.
Showers, more disbelief, and dinner.
It would just hit us - we missed our fucking flight. There would be a calm and then it would hit us again.
I started making calls. Asiana told us we needed to re-book through our travel agent. Vayama said sure they would do it but need a reservation code from Asiana. Asiana said they didn't know what the fuck Vayama had been smoking. Vayama tried to get me to call Asiana again, all of this costing a dollar a every time I hung up the phone. No. I put on my stern voice, it's funny how we have voices for moments like this. So Vayama called Asiana. It was going to cost us between 500 and 600 dollars, given the fees and the current difference in prices.
Well, she would write an e-mail to her supervisors about the Delay Verification Forms we received and maybe they could wave some of the fees. Oh, and the ticket would be for the 26th.
It looks like we were stuck in Chicago. We looked for new flights online, something that left before the 26th. Maybe we could just buy a new ticket for a little bit more and get to Phuket. Jackie was supposed to sign her contract on the 25th and start work on the 29th.
We got in contact with Rob, a good friend, who was willing to put us up in Chicago, while we waited for our new possible departure date. It was hard to make the best of the situation, because there wasn't anything concrete about the situation. If we knew it was going to cost X amount of dollars and we would be on flight X then we could start to adjust: cry about having lost any financial padding that we might have had for the trip and then move on, but as it was nothing was certain. Vayama stopped answering their phone and I still hadn't gotten word from them about waving some of the fees.
So we hung out, stopped in at the pool, made more and more disheartening jokes about what fuck ups we were and then called it a night. We'd just have to get up early in the morning and run over to Asiana and hope that we could get on standby, but we already knew it was a booked flight.
OMG What a story between this one and the following one that Jackie made. Jackie you are AWESOME. Isaac, I love how you describe and honor your beautiful, smart and smiling partner! Best wishes to two amazing people. Love the posts.
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