What Happens in Phoenix...Part II

Aha! You foolishly thought I'd only write one blog post about our thrilling experience flying to Phoenix!  No such luck. After all, we'd only just managed to get to Phoenix.  We still had to get back.  And why it should be any less interesting on the return trip, I have no idea.  Neither did the travel gods, who for some reason just didn't care for us this time around.

I might add, though, that the time we spent in Phoenix was fine.  We hung around with my parents, sister and other relatives, went to an amazing museum (the Musical Instrument Museum in Scottsdale; definitely check it out if you're ever in the neighborhood) that I had to pry Joan out of with a crowbar, and caught up with some of my friends.  But getting there was not half the fun.  Getting back wasn't very good either.

For the record, I am firing myself as staff travel agent.  Not only did I get us a flight out that required us to catch a Wonder Shuttle at four o'clock in the blessed morning, I got us a flight back that changed planes in Albuquerque.  Flights that change planes need to be avoided like the plague.  Any time you change planes, you multiply the chances that something can go wrong.  And given a chance to go wrong, most things will oblige, at least occasionally.  So we need a new travel agent.  Applications are being solicited through this blog.  All applicants must be marginally sane, understand Expedia.com and believe, as we do, that all airlines are evil, though some are more evil than others.  Okay?  Okay.

Moving on:  Our flight actually arrived in Albuquerque about ten minutes early, and it also showed up at the gate right next to our next departure gate.  This meant that not only did we have time to buy a sandwich, we also didn't need the nice wheelchair guy that showed up to help.  Unfortunately, I'd bought a sandwich in Phoenix, assuming that we wouldn't have time to buy one in Albuquerque.  So we had this slightly smashed roast beef sandwich to share, complete with soggy bread and smears of what looked like salad dressing on the outside of my purse.  Oh well.  It was pretty tasty anyway.

Upon arriving in Phoenix, though, we had a problem.  No ground transportation.  Joan called Wonder Shuttle, which told her to wait until we'd picked up our bags and then call back.  We got the bags (or rather, I got the bags - note to travel agent applicants: I'll still get the bags.  It's why they pay me the big bucks) and Joan called Wonder Shuttle again.  The dispatcher guy told Joan they were "having trouble getting drivers to return to the airport," so it would be 30 to 45 minutes before they could pick us up.

Mind you, they knew we were coming.  We had to give them our flight numbers and all that when we booked (and prepaid for) the ride.  Why they were now telling us, close to midnight at the end of a very long day, that they couldn't pick us up for close to an hour made absolutely no sense.  And what were they doing, in the 15 minutes between our first call and our second call?  Playing "Tetris," apparently.  Or maybe something ruder that can't be typed into a religious-type blog like this one.

Anyway, spending 45 minutes standing outside in the dark and cold at Love Field, which isn't exactly the wisest place for a pair of women to hang out alone at night, wasn't high on either of our lists.  I had some money left, so we basically said "fuck it" and grabbed a cab.  And as always happens when we grabbed a cab, we took our lives in our hands.  Not since we whipped around the statue of Benito Juarez in downtown Tijuana on two wheels have we had such an entertaining high-speed cab ride. I dunno what the speed limit is in Highland Park, but we probably blew through it by about double.  In between clinging to the lord help me Jesus bars inside the cab and covering our eyes as we careened through red lights, Joan said, "Why don't you call Wonder Shuttle and ask for a refund."  I said, "If we survive this, I certainly will."

We reached the freeway and were forced to slow down to around seventy miles an hour.  I called Wonder Shuttle, told the annoying voice-automated system that I was requesting a refund, and got the dispatcher Joan had talked to before.  "Hey," he said, "I think I can have a van to you in about ten minutes."  "I'm sorry," I told him,  "We're already in a cab and gone."  He transferred me to a supervisor, who apparently was supposed to talk us out of it. Out of what?  Out of being in a cab and gone?  

Ponder this:  I had only very recently been asked if I was sure I was in Phoenix. Now somebody was trying to talk me out of wanting a refund.  I don't normally handle situations like this very well.  All the same, I didn't blow up and I didn't tear this guy's head off.  I just used my Best Paralegal Voice to tell him, "We were told 30 to 45 minutes.  That's unacceptable at this hour, so we got a cab.  And we'd like a refund."  My Best Paralegal Voice must still work, because he said, "Okay, that'll take three to five business days."  By the end of this sentence, we were in our driveway.  I think the hyperspace thrusters on this cab were kind of warn out.

Anyway, we made it home in one piece, I didn't yell at anybody and nothing disappeared from either of our suitcases, except Joan's grey robe, which thankfully reappeared.  So all's well.  Sort of.  Except for needing a new travel agent.  Again, I'm screening resumes.  The salary's not great, but the benefits are pretty cool.  Er, or so I hear.

What Happens in Phoenix...

...doesn't exist, evidently.

Lemme splain. No, is too much. Lemme som opp.  Joan and I flew to Phoenix to see my mom and dad for Thanksgiving. Or at least we tried to fly to Phoenix.  Things started going wrong the second the Super Shuttle showed up. It never would have occurred to me that now, in the Common Era 2014, they might not be disabled accessible. But the guy showed up, and he had a van that could only be reached by climbing up into it. Fine for me but not for Joan, who's been hobbling around with a cane for the last couple of weeks. Bad knee. And bad foot. And sometimes both a bad knee and a bad foot. Anyway, after three failed attempts, we finally put her in the front seat, with both me and the Super Shuttle guy giving her a mighty push from the rear.  Mission accomplished, but I had no idea how I was going to get her back out again.

Matters did not improve once we got to the airport, either. Yes, we got Joan back out of the van (gravity is your friend), but the ticket agent had a problem with us.  See, we had three tickts and only two human beings. This was beause we were flying on Mas Barato Airlines. Mas Barato is a fine airline, but if you look like you're too large to fit into one of their 16" seats (which covers a lot of tall people, as well as fat people), they've been known to pull you out of line and make you buy another seat on the spot. Especially if you're a woman (there was a lawsuit about this).  We buy three seats together, which means we get a row to ourselves. It's a whole lot easier to just buy the extra seat when you book the flight, but we never, and I do mean never, get through the airport without a lot of hassle when we do this.

In this instance, the ticket agent couldn't get her machine to print us a boarding pass for the third seat. She had to call her supervisor. 25 minutes later she was still on the phone, saying things like "The what screen?" and "What's that? I've never heard of that." Joan, meanwhile, had asked for a wheelchair, but none had ever shown up. She headed off to the ladies' room right around the time the boarding pass had finally printed. By now, we had about 15 minutes to make the plane.

I took the boarding passes and sprinted for the ladies' room, where I caught up with Joan and where, by some miracle, the wheelchair finally caught up with us. The TSA let us go through the wheelchair line, which was a lot shorter, and the wheelchair took off running on the other side while I was still putting my shoes back on. I ran like the hounds of Pink Floyd were at my heels, but I didn't catch up until I got to the actual gate. By then they were wheeling Joan down the jetway, and we collapsed into our private row just before the doors shut and the engines roared to life. Whew.

Okay, we're on the right plane and it's going the right direction and all should be well from here on out, right? Um, no. After we got to Phoenix, we got an email from the airline that since we'd failed to show up for our flight out, they were cancelling our flight back. Now, I like Phoenix, but I had no intention of staying there, so I called Mas Barato Airlines to find out what was going on. After i'd told my story to successively higher-placed supervisors, I finally got one that seemed to know what was going on. At least until she asked me, "Are you sure you're in Phoenix?"

Am I sure I'm in Phoenix. Ponder that for a moment. Existential questions aside (how, for example, does anyone know they're really in Phoenix?) that was something I'd never considered before. I mean, maybe I was in Hawaii. Lots of sun, lots of sand. Maybe I was in Aruba. Jamaica. Bermuda? Bahama? Anyway; I said the first thing that came to mind, which was "I beg your pardon?" And she repeated it. "Are you sure you're in Phoenix?" Honestly, don't they teach you to listen to your own questions in customer service school?

Well, I finally admitted to being sure I was in Phoenix, since, uh, I actually was in Phoenix (or Chandler, if you want to get picky).  And another long silence followed, after which she told me that the originating airport had blah blah blah something technical, which had caused blah blah blah something else technical,and in other words they were blaming the computer. But, no harm no fowl, we still had reservations to fly back to Dallas. Which was all I really cared about, so I let the rest slide. But I wonder what's gonna happen when we get to the airport to fly home. Maybe they'll ask if I'm sure I'm at Sky Harbor. Or worse, Albuquerque.

...And He Is Us, Part II

Playing in the background: The soothing chuggity-chug of the washing machine
Meters swum today: None, 1300 yesterday.

Y'all may find this hard to believe, but once in a while I get negative comments on this blog. Some people even call me bad names. Check out the response to ...And He Is Us, below. Oh, wait, you can't because it's not there. I deleted it. And before you jump all over me for stifling interfaith discussion and discouraging conflicting opinions, let me just say that I had three (count 'em, three) very good reasons for deleting the comment. One, there's a big difference between enlightened discussion and throwing more fuel on the fire of conflict. If you want to engage in enlightened discussion, you should probably not start off your first sentence by calling the other person an idiot. Two, this here's a religious establishment and y'all need to act respectable. Three, this is my blog and I'll delete whatever I want. You wanna call me names, do it on your own blog.

That aside, though, this person did have a couple of valid points. One of them was that you don't often see Buddhists or Catholics or Seventh-Day Adventists hijacking airplanes (though one wonders what faith D.B. Cooper professed; I'd suspect some stripe of Protestant, but I could be wrong.) In fact, El Al, the state airline of Israel and by far one of the safest in the world, admits to practicing 'racial profiling' in its screening of passengers - specifically singling out young Islamic men. They can get away with that, in part because they're a small airline (this level of security is ridiculously labor-intensive) and in part because they're based in Israel, where the laws are different. This would never fly, so to speak, in the States. That rotten ol' "all men are created equal" thing in the Declaration of Independence is still causing trouble after 230 years.

Which leads us to this person's second point about the additional layer of personal responsibility one should be required to assume in a post 9-11 world. The person points out that if a family of white Southern Baptists had a discussion about airline safety prior to take-off, we never would have read about it. Anybody getting on an airplane in traditional Muslim dress should confine his or her conversation to English-language discussions of bunnies, flowers and Shakespeare. (The sonnets, not those violent plays.) Furthermore, this person says that the airline shouldn't have said, "We're sorry, here's your free tickets"; it should have said, "We're not sorry, you're banned for life and we're suing you for the cost of diverting the plane and delaying everybody for two hours."

Look: Airline pilots have always had wide discretion to decide who flies aboard their aircraft. Pilots have been known to remove people from flights for everything from making jokes about drunk pilots (following an incident at Heathrow, London involving a United Airlines pilot from the States) to wearing provocative buttons to not wearing enough clothing. The safety of everybody aboard is the most important concern, and the joking half-naked button-wearing passengers of the world can't be allowed to open emergency-exit doors in flight and stuff like that.

In this instance, the pilot did what the pilot was supposed to do; he (or she) reported the incident to the TSA. The TSA did what the TSA was supposed to do; it investigated, called in the FBI, and then determined that there wasn't a problem. The airline then did what it was supposed to do; it apologized and gave the family new tickets. The point of my post, which seems to have been lost on my commentor as well as the general public, is that it's not the airline that should be apologizing. In fact, let's put that in bold caps. THE AIRLINE SHOULD NOT BE APOLOGIZING. THE TWO TEENAGE GIRLS WHO OVERHEARD THIS NON-EVENT AND BLEW IT ALL OUT OF PROPORTION ARE THE ONES WHO SHOULD BE APOLOGIZING.

I can't imagine it's ever a good idea to jump on an airplane and begin a loud conversation about how Dan Simmons' last book, The TERROR*, really BOMBED and he better get himself a new editor or else he's gonna CRASH. But that's not what happened here. Nor here: This guy was told he couldn't get on an airplane unless he covered up a t-shirt** with Arabic script. (He sued and was awarded $240,000.) A man on a Canadian airliner was removed for praying before takeoff. He wasn't even Muslim; he was a Haisidic Jew. And in one celebrated incident, six Islamic imams who were removed from an airplane in Minneapolis were the subject of conspiracy theories that they staged the whole event as a publicity stunt. Right. I'm sure this mom and her son got themselves tossed off an airplane to raise money for autism research.

I always pray before takeoff. What should I do if somebody next to me thinks Om mani padme hum means "Death to America" in Sanskrit? Do Buddhist monks make other travelers "uncomfortable" because they're obviously wearing "religious dress"? How about Orthodox priests? They look pretty suspicious. Plus, they have long beards. Just like imams. Should we go past Flying while Muslim/Russian/Buddhist/Seventh-Day Adventist/Whatever to the much simpler Flying While Different and just get rid of everybody who isn't white, Christian and normal?

I like my idea better. Let's all just take a deep breath and relax. Om mani padme hum.

*Incidentally, I loved that book. I do think it could have been a couple hundred pages shorter, though.

**The T-shirt read, "We will not be silent." You gotta wonder if he would have received more or less money if the shirt had read, "Fly the Friendly Skies."

...And He Is Us

Playing in the background: The sonorous tap-tap-tapping of a hammer on nails
Meters swum today: None. (1.4 km for 2009.)

Once in a while I wonder about us. We humans, I mean. For all we're brilliant beings and the apex of evolution (unless you count octopuses, and I, personally, do; next time around I wanna be a cephelopod) we still do some of the stupidest things imaginable, lots of which flat-out threaten our survival as a species. This isn't that kind of post, though. This is about more mundane stupidity: Tossing people off an airplane because of their conversation.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for tossing people off airplanes. Drunk and disorderly? Toss 'em off. Sick with something communicable and really dangerous, like multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis? Toss 'em off. Parents of small kids who haven't bothered to explain to said kids how one behaves in a situation where one is trapped with dozens of strangers in a small metal tube or don't bother to restrain their little darlings from running up and down the aisles, kicking the seat in front of them and screaming at the top of their lungs? Fergodsake, toss 'em off. I'd be for tossing off the kids, too, but by and large it isn't their fault. We're not born knowing how to be polite in public. We have to be taught. Woe unto us if the people we're born to can't be bothered.

No, what I'm talking about here is booting people who aren't causing any problems off an airplane because you don't like their conversations, their skin color, the way they dress or the language they happen to speak. What I'm talking about here is this Muslim family of nine, on its way to Orlando for a religious retreat, that got kicked off an airplane for the crime of (gasp!) talking about where it's safest to sit:

Officials said two teenage girls sitting nearby became alarmed when they heard Sahin remark that sitting near the engines would not be safe in the event of an accident or an explosion. The girls told their parents, who told a flight attendant, AirTran officials said.

Okay, let's back that up a sec. Hands up who's ever had a conversation about airplane safety. Hands up who's ever had a conversation about airplane safety on an airplane. I thought so. I mean, where else do you discuss airplane safety, a frick'n city bus? All you have to do is pick up the cute little card they stick into the seat pocket in front of you to start a discussion about airplane safety. Myself, I worry about all the things people don't discuss. Like why you shouldn't try to take your carry-ons in the event of an evacuation (the bags hinder the evacuation, and people die) or why you shouldn't inflate your life vest until you're in the water (the life vests are big and bulky, they make it hard to see, they hinder the evacuation, and people die). Look, I know airplane crashes are extremely unlikely, but I've been in several near-disasters and I can tell ya, you need to know what to do in those situations and why. The way you find out what you need to do is to listen to the nice flight attendant doing the demo, reading the little card, and (gasp!) talking to people.

I better back up a sec. My dad flies a light plane, a four-seater one-engine job. He's an ex-Air Force pilot and he taught students for years. If Mom happened to be busy and Dad had a lesson to teach, me and my sister went along for the ride. Among the many things that went wrong; the alternator died on us, we landed without power (several times), one of the students did an unauthorized barrel roll (that was fun, actually); the door popped open at 5,000 feet and we caught ice outside of Heber, Utah and landed sans radio or lights in the dark of night. And one time we almost ran over a coyote but that was kind of my fault. What I'm trying to say here is, big commercial airliners are safe. Stuff like this hardly ever happens. Besides, it all happened to me and I'm still in one piece.

Back to this family, though. It's hard to argue that they got tossed off the airplane for any reason other than their appearance and their conversation. That sucks rocks. If anybody should get tossed off an airplane because of their conversation, it's the half-naked blonde bimbos on the way back from Spring Break who loudly extoll the virtues of oral sex with Tim, or was it Jim, on the beach at Corpus Christi to the entire airplane, whether they want to hear it or not. Or the drunks on their way to Vegas who keep doing high-fives and waving their shirts over their heads to look cool. A Muslim family in religious dress, on its way to a religious retreat, just does not fit into this category.

The FBI and the Homeland Security officials who responded to this non-incident were, by all accounts, professional and polite. The airline, AirTran, has apologized and refunded the tickets to the family, which is only right. Still, I don't think it's fair to blame the airline or the officials. The people responsible for this fiasco are the two teenage girls, who "became alarmed," and their parents, who over-reacted to a single reported snippet of conversation (hearsay!), got freaked out because the people who were having the conversation Didn't Look Like Them, and ended up violating the civil rights of nine people, to say nothing of delaying everybody else for hours. Happy frick'n New Year to you, too.

So there you have it. When it comes down to bad behavior of the human species, in the end we can blame only ourselves, our own prejudices and irrational fears and unwillingness to just let things be what they are. I hope the teenage girls are good and embarrassed. I hope the parents are having a long hard look at themselves. I hope so, but I'm pessimistic. We keep doing this shit. Us, we humans, the whole planet. If I can figure out who's representing these people, I may just send them a written apology. I think they're owed one. Not by the airline, by us. We humans, the whole planet.

Dva Vodkii, Pajalsta

Playing on the iPod: David Arkenstone, "Spirit of Tibet"
Meters swum today: None. I was busy driving around town picking up expert witnesses at the airport. No, really.

World travel: I does it. Or I would do it if I had any money, which I do, but it keeps getting chewed away by stuff like mortgage payments and groceries and IRAs and cat food. It sucks being a responsible adult sometimes. However, Joan and I have managed to break the surly bonds of this continent a few times. We've been to London. We've been to--no, not France. Ireland. Twice, in fact, the first time getting cut a bit short when Joan got deathly ill and spent a week in a hospital in this little town called Ennis. Sans Joan, I've also been to El Salvador, Guatemala, parts of Mexico, Canada and Sweden. Yeah, I know Sweden doesn't fit on that list, but where else am I gonna put it? I am dying to see Iceland, India, Tibet (or maybe just northern India--the Himalayas, anyway), southern Africa, Morocco, Egypt, Japan, maybe China, and Thailand.

So with summer coming and north Texas pausing for breath between the deep freeze and the blast furnace, talk turns of where to go next. For some reason I was stuck on Spain. Joan was stuck on Scotland. Scotland: I've been there. Three times. It's cold. It's wet. It's occupied territory. Yeah, it's very pretty and all that. I couldn't seem to sell Joan on Spain, either, except that I wanted to see the running of the bulls in Pamplona on July 7. (I think Joan's afraid I'd jump in there and run, too. Can't imagine why she'd suspect me of such a thing.) Then suddenly, out of the clear blue sky, Joan said, "How about Russia?"

BLING!! That was the sound of my brain converting to Cyrillic letters.

People don't know this about me, but I took a semester of Russian in college. That foreign language requirement thing. I already spoke Spanish, they didn't offer Arabic, and I've already tried once to learn German, thankewverymuch. (Joan speaks German. Joan is also a member of Mensa.) So I took Russian, and everything was fine until the nouns started changing their endings. Somehow this messed with my brain, and I barely scraped through with a C. So back to Spanish, for the easy A. But I always liked Russian. The alphabet, especially. Besides looking totally cool, all the letters sound like exactly what they are. If you're dyslexic (and I am; I words spell order in wrong the), this is the perfect alphabet for you. No guessing required, except the hard sign versus the soft sign, and most Russians are pretty much over the hard sign by now, so if you guess the soft sign, you're right, unless you're in the Ukraine.

And so, as we ponder Volga River cruises and excursions to the Hermitage (in 2009, realistically speaking; this won't be a cheap trip) yours truly and Joan will be attempting to learn some Russian in our copious spare time. I've already remembered the sixteen words I learned and am adding a few more. Joan's worried about the alphabet but she shouldn't be; the Queen of Pattern Recognition will be fine once she knows the basic sounds. So if anybody out there has the Rosetta Stone software in Russian, buzz me, okay? I'll give you a good price. Pravda. Spaciba.

Now, if we can just get those pesky nouns to stop changing their endings...