Christmas in Casper

This year, I got luggage for Christmas.

Let me just say that, on the surface, the aftermath of last week’s storm in Denver seemed to be taken care of. When we arrived on Sunday evening, the hordes of people sleeping in the airport were gone, the detritus of all those thousands of stranded passengers was gone, and except for the 8 or 10 foot snow banks, you’d never know that the airport had just dug itself out of a blizzard.

But all was not well in Mudville.

When we got off our flight from San Diego, we checked the monitor for our outbound flight, got the gate number and headed there. We had a couple hours to kill, so we stopped for dinner. We got to the gate in plenty of time, and watched as standby passengers hugged and congratulated the ones who’d been called for a seat on each flight.

In retrospect, this should have been a warning sign. Standby passengers shouldn’t be that friendly with each other.

We waited until it was time for our flight to board, and oddly, we heard nothing about it.

I got up to check the monitor, because our airline? Might have changed the gate while we were having dinner.

So I’m looking at the monitor and it very clearly says that the gate where we’d been sitting for 90 minutes was our departure gate. But the gate closest to the monitor? The back board at that gate lists our flight.

As delayed.

I can often be helpful, or at least I’ve been told I can be, so I very kindly approached the gate agent and said, “Did you know that the monitor has the wrong gate listed?”

I did not expect the response I got. I expected the woman to say, “Oh, really? Sorry about that! Thanks for letting us know, I’ll get that fixed right away, and we’ll make an announcement at the other gate.”

When the shimmering that always seems to indicate the shift between my imagination and the Real World stopped, the gate agent simply looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “We have no control over that.” And then she turned and walked away before I could ask her another silly question like, “How long will we be delayed?”

When I walked back past the monitor, I got my answer to that question: two hours.

The girls and I relocated to the new gate and settled in for a two hour delay. The last time we’d flown through here at Christmas, it had been a five hour delay, so at that point we agreed that we were pretty lucky.

And then I got the phone call from Orbitz confirming the two hour delay.

I called my dad and let him know, and as soon as I hung up? Another call from Orbitz telling me that the delay had been extended by half an hour.

At some point after ten p.m., the gate agents disappeared. I’m sure they didn’t vanish into thin air, like Cheshire Cats, but they might as well have.

At around eleven, just about the time that we should have been boarding our delayed flight, another gate agent showed up, and my phone rang. Orbitz again: flight cancelled. I calmly walked over to the gate agent, who was setting up her stuff for boarding, and asked, “Is it true that our flight was just cancelled?”

“Was it?” she asked. “Let me check.”

She tapped a few keys on the computer, then said, “I better go ask my supervisor,” and hurried off to Customer Service across the concourse.

Right about then, someone’s kid said, “Hey, the board shows our flight’s been cancelled!”

I told the girls to grab all our stuff and follow me to Customer Service…I wanted to beat the rush.

When I got to the counter, the woman there took our boarding passes, lackadaisically tapped her keyboard a few times. The agent next to her told the passenger next to me that she’d be put on standby for the first flight on Christmas morning, but that the flight was already overbooked, so while there wasn’t much hope, there was at least some hope that she’d be able to make it out in the morning.

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. The agent I was dealing with said with a bored sigh, “I might be able to get you on a flight on Tuesday evening.”

Tuesday? Tuesday as in two days from now, Tuesday? I was incredulous. “Oh, no,” I said, “you guys have been rude to me and lied to me and this cancellation is because you couldn’t fix your airplane on Christmas Eve…you’re going to make this right. You’re going to do right by me.”

The woman looked at me with fire in her eyes. She grabbed our boarding passes and crushed them in her fist before slamming them on the counter in front of me. “I,” she snarled, “am not helping you!” She spun and headed for the Customer Service office.

“What??? I want your name!” I shouted after her.

“You’re not going to get it!” and she disappeared into the office.

“Sir?” said one of the other agents. “If you don’t calm down, I’ll call the police.”

I thought about that for a minute. I didn’t doubt for a second that he was serious. So I stood there silently, wavering between astonishment and panic. What happened to the option to go standby on Christmas day? What happened to the customer service representative calmly talking the distraught passenger through the choices available? What happened to the recognition that the customer has the airline a lot of money to make sure that he and his kids could be with their family on Christmas? What could I have said that would warrant a threat to call the police? I replayed what I said; I did not use foul language. I only raised my voice to be heard across the room by the retreating customer service representative. Correction: the retreating airline employee.

And the ultimate question: Now what do I do?

Other passengers came to the counter, were apologetically told they’d be on standby for the next day, received their hotel and meal vouchers, and left.

I held my ground at the counter.

Other passengers reacted with shock, incredulity, and anger. They were given their boarding passes for the cancelled flight and told to go away, and I wondered if I was seeing some new company policy: don’t help any customer who is upset.

While I stood there quietly, the police did, in fact, arrive.

It was then that I noticed the mob behind me. If I squinted just right, the whole scene turned black and white, and those skis that guy had? might have passed for a pitchfork.

The girl from our gate who had so helpfully disappeared when I asked if our flight had been cancelled reappeared to help get things straightened out for me. She was friendly and talkative, and she got me a hotel voucher and meal vouchers right away. She tried to arrange for our baggage to be set out for us before we left for the hotel.

And while we were waiting for that, she refused to let me out of her sight.

At some point her supervisor told her that there would be another flight in the morning, an extra flight to take care of the passengers on the cancelled Casper flight. The flight time was so early in the morning that by the time she got me flight vouchers, it no longer made sense for us to go to the hotel.

When I told my daughters we’d be spending the night in the airport, they said, “Kewl!”

I did not sleep. Alanna slept on the floor for an hour or two, while Heidi and I watched part of “King Kong” on Alanna’s DVD player.

By 6 a.m., our extra flight had still not shown on the monitor, but a phone call to the reservation number and we had confirmed seats for the flight departing at 8:15.

Before boarding, I asked the gate agent to confirm that our bags would be on our flight. She said, “Yes, I show them waiting to be scanned for your flight.”

Perfect. We’d be there in time for a late Christmas breakfast, even if it wasn’t to be my Dad’s amazing pancakes.

The thirteen of us on that extra flight were relieved to finally enter the terminal to see our loved ones, some of whom had spent the night in the Casper terminal and faced a two or three hour drive home.

For the first few minutes after the baggage turnstile began to move, there was laughter and friendly banter, except for the one slightly crazy-looking woman who had arrived from Denver three days before and still had not gotten her luggage.

And then the turnstile stopped.

Not one of us on that flight had picked up a bag.

We headed to the counter en masse.

There was one. One? One. Airline. Employee. At the ticket counter.

And she was looking at a line of thirty passengers headed out on the next flight to Denver.

We went home.

Most of our Christmas presents were in our checked bags.

So. We had breakfast.

And we opened the gifts we had.

And we made each other laugh.

And we had a terrific dinner, turkey with all the trimmings.

And the morning after (Boxing Day, if you’re Meg), we went back out to the airport.

And there were our bags. So, I got my own luggage for Christmas. A day late, but just as appreciated.

In a perfect world, I’d be able to say that I handled it all with dignity and grace, but even the world inside my head isn’t perfect.

Has Christmas been wonderful, in spite of the adventure? Yes, and partly because of it.

As I write this, it is snowing outside, and has been for more than four hours. Denver’s airport is once again closed, and we can almost certainly look forward to more trouble on our return trip.

But the snow sure is pretty.