Amber Night

Next time I hear some geezer whining about the Bataan Death March, I'm telling 'em this story.

This morning I received a $100 voucher from United Airlines for my trouble. I've probably taken more shit for less, but, I can't remember when.

As mentioned , my flight into SFO was delayed by close to an hour, which was about all I had in the way of layover time.  I raced to my gate like a…like something that races…to, um, gates, where I discovered that my connection was delayed an hour due to weather.  This was around 8pm.  An hour passed, nothing.  After almost 2 hours had passed, United announced the flight had been cancelled.  We would be rounded up on shuttles for a 2 hour drive to to Monterey.  This would get me in around midnight, which sucked.

So myself and the other passengers who were too retarded to make a beeline to Hertz took a little field trip down to the luggage carousel to retrieve our baggage.  I think it's interesting that they call it a carousel.  Because, if I recall my childhood  correctly, carousels are supposed to be fun.  This one, however, should have been called a "luggage lawn dart to the face," because it was decidedly un-fun.  Which is to say it contained no luggage for a very fucking long time.  Our United escorts (as opposed to United "cheap hos"–these ladies were classy) phoned the luggage morlocks, who assured us it would be there soon.  Soon came and went, and still no baggage.  More phone calls, more assurances.  Finally, and I am not making this up, the luggage shows up at fucking midnight.  Did I mention that in the non-bizarro world space-time continuum I should have been crossing my humble little threshold three and a half hours ago?

Off to the van.

My van, or more accurately, the van to which I was assigned, was driven by a man who spoke only Mandarin, and who had never actually been south of San Jose.  His boss informed us of these 2 facts, as if explaining away some minor cosmetic scratches in the paint job.

"No problem," one of my fellow dumb-ass passengers assured him, "we can get him to Monterey."

The logic of the thing caused a handful of my brain cells to just give up and turn on Jerry.  We airplane passengers had, in effect, just volunteered to escort this man to Monterey, a place which he had never been.  A place United Airlines had hired him to take us to.  Now don't get me wrong.  I have nothing against the Mandarese.  I love their oranges.  If the man knew where he was going I wouldn't think twice about it.

I'm not sure what part of "only speaks Mandarin" and "has never been south of San Jose" my fellow passengers didn't understand, because nobody seemed too troubled by these crimson flags.  I saw them because I play computer games.  Like you, I know that if you can't understand what your party leader is saying, and he doesn't know where the fuck he's going, you're pretty much asking for a full frontal wipe.  Try engineering that train of logic for your fellow passengers though.  Especially after they just saw TSA pat you down 4 hours earlier.

Things were going fine until just south of Cupertino.  By fine I mean stark fear had settled in to silent whimpering.  The driver knew 2 speeds, stop and go-really-goddamned fast.  He knew 3 directions, more-or-less-straight-ahead, hard left, and hard right.  And he had a cell phone jammed into his ear most of the time.  You had to be there.

Just past Cupertino the right front tire asploded.  This was a surprise to everyone, most especially the driver, who decided the best course of action was to slam heavily on the brakes and come to a stop in the middle lane facing the completely back-assed wrong direction.

And then…he just sat there.  After what seemed like 30 years of this, as we watched oncoming headlights blowing their horns at us and scattering to either side, some of the more helpful passengers started screaming that it might be a really good idea to pull over to the shoulder.  And it was a really good idea, except that the driver couldn't understand them because he only spoke fucking Mandarin.  Does anyone listen to the crazy lady in the yellow poncho?  No.  Fuck em, they are not rolling for loot when this is all over.

Long story short, the driver finally got over to the shoulder and proceeded to learn how to change a tire.  The problem was that the tire had spun off the rim in such a way as to obscure the bolts or whatever the fuck holds a tire on, so it took awhile.  After it became evident that the driver had never changed a tire in his life, 3 of the other passengers who presumably had changed at least one tire between themselves, struggled with it for another hour, while the rest of us waited along side the road.  Nobody was interested at all in how I had been right all along and that if people would just listen to me once in awhile we might not be in this mess.  They were all really mean, actually.

At one point someone phoned the shuttle company (their phone number was plastered on the side of the van) and told them of our predicament.  The dispatcher didn't seem too concerned, and refused to send a second van out to rescue us.  No rez 4joo.

Finally the new tire was bolted on and we were ready to roll.

Oh did I mention it only had about 1/3 of the air it was supposed to have in it? Yeah, that's kind of important because that stretch of the 101 just past the Cupertino exit has absolutely nothing in the way of services for about 10 miles.  So we drove for about 10 miles at 20 miles an hour (do the math at home kids) until we found a service station.  And they had air!

Except that nobody had quarters.  I repeat.  No-fucking-body had quarters.  And the station was otherwise closed.

One of the passengers made the air thing work.  I don't know how he did it, and I don't really want to know.  But we did get air, and I am completely happy with the explanation that it was magic air.  I am a believer in magic air.  All praise the magic air djinns.

We rolled in to Monterey airport at about 3am, I got home about 3:30am, and United was gracious enough to give me a $100 travel voucher for my trouble.  Wasn't that nice of them?

For your reference, the company that provided the shuttle and driver was M&M Shuttle.  I just thought you should know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 at 1:03 am and is filed under It's all about me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.