Monday, October 25, 2004
Excuse Me Whilst I Repeat…
…in case I wasn’t absolutely, positively, perfectly clear last time…
I FRICKIN’ HATE DFW!!!!!!
Warning, the remainder of this entry is more of a novel. I had to vent, and this was the venue I chose. Just be glad I typed it into the permalink and not into the RSS feed! Read on, or don’t. I couldn’t care less.
I swear, if it costs me an extra hundred or two to go around, I am NOT flying through that hellhole ever again.
As I mentioned before, the dipwad check-in attendant told me my flight leaving DFW to go to SeaTac was in Terminal A when it was actually in C, and even my boarding pass said gate A38.
Returning home on Sunday, the plane I was to board got into Seattle late and ended up leaving me about 10 minutes, this time to get from Terminal C to Terminal A for my connection. The only good thing of it all is that both my arrival gate and the departure gate were near the walkway that connects the terminals, but yet another dipwad worker replied A37 when I trotted out of the arrival gate and inquired, “Orlando?”
I arrived at A37 and stood for a moment or two catching my breath, wondering why a lot of people were still sitting and waiting. I finally had the presence of mind to ask someone if they were headed to Orlando and a guy told me he heard them calling for Orlando at A35.
GRRRR. I and one other lady squeezed through the gate door before they closed it.
Alas, even though the plane on which I arrived and the plane on which I was boarding were sitting practically tail-to-tail from each other, my two bags didn’t make it. What’s worse is that our plane and 30+ others sat on the taxiway for about an hour while a big storm passed over to the east of Dallas. I’m not knocking the decision to hold the flights—I’m sure I wouldn’t have wanted to fly through that storm—but if they knew there was bad weather at the time the pilot shut down the engines, they would’ve known there was bad weather five minutes earlier when we were still at the gate, wouldn’t they? Storms don’t just appear that quickly. So if we had waited at the gate instead, even if they didn’t let people “deplane” (I hate that word), they might at least have had the extra time to get my bags on board.
So I get to Orlando, sans bags, and finally get home well after 1am. I’d not eaten a thing since the piddly bistro bag coming out of Seattle, so I was pretty famished. We all know the type of food joints that are the only things open at this hour on Sunday evenings/Monday mornings. Naturally, my stomach didn’t want to let me sleep after being forced to digest the stuff.
I ended up with maybe three hours of somewhat decent sleep, waking up at 8:30 because that’s when my bags were supposed to be on the road. Upon calling to confirm, all I could get, at first, was “within six hours.” As tired as I was and fearing I’d not hear the person knock on my door—let alone finding my apartment unit—I stayed up.
Of course, this completely throws off my planned schedule of doing laundry, and throwing it off even worse was the realization around midmorning that a tire on my car had picked up a screw and was partially deflated.
A few hours and a couple very filthy hands later, my tire was repaired and the donut was back in its rightful home. Now to pick up my held mail.
Almost as much as I hate DFW, I hate my post office. Ever since they split up the branch by keeping the original building as a no-customers-allowed—PERIOD facility and opening an annex a little ways from the old building, I’ve had grief. While they claim the office is not usually extremely busy (webcams and live transaction reports supposedly confirm it) there’s a 15- to 30-minute wait every time I go in. Only one or, if I’m lucky, two people are working the counters. Horrible timing, it would seem. Even worse, this makes twice in a row (and three times, total) that they have not done what I indicated on the Hold Mail card. I specifically marked the box that I’d pick up my mail on October 25. Is it waiting for me? Of course not. Theoretically, it’ll get delivered tomorrow and the driver probably won’t have the presence of mind to put it all in a package locker—choosing instead to cram it all in my tiny, yet standard-sized, apartment complex mailbox.
A postal worker was getting off about how customers should call in a day or two before to confirm pick-up. That’s fine, and I’d be happy to do so, but the Hold Mail card has absolutely NO printed instructions to this effect and, more importantly, no phone number to even give a clue that I should call first. If that’s normal procedure, then put it on the damn card!
Still more salt in the wound is the fact that this “annex” office apparently has no phone—at least not one with a published number. The phone book lists the address for the location since customers can’t go into the sorting facility (the old location), but the phone number actually calls that old location. Thus, the only way to interact with the location I’m allowed to interact with is to actually go there and, in my case, wait in line. It seems to be quite the chore to figure out whether items are in the sorting facility, the annex, or on a truck.
I never had grief like this before the office split up. You can be assured I’ll make certain that when I finally find a townhome and move, I’ll have picked a region with a post office that isn’t spun out into an annex.
By the way, after all this, I still haven’t done laundry, I’m very sleepy, but I’m very hungry again. Since I ate so late the night before, I wasn’t hungry at lunch time today and didn’t eat ‘til nearly 4pm while my tire was being fixed. So, of course, I wasn’t hungry around usual dinner time, but now I am.
I am so warped right now.
And I still hate DFW!!
» Posted by ALBj at 11:50 PM (ET)
Category: Journal, Rant
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