Desire!

I just bought the Desire LP! If you want to know why this excites me so much, read this post. I haven’t heard this album in so many years, and I’m glad to say that it was as wonderful as I remembered it. Bob Dylan  poetry trembles a bit, in some songs, but hey, I’m not an international music superstar, and I won’t complain.

In other news, the movie recommendation of the week is The Swing Kids. Don’t watch it when you’re depressed, it won’t help. That apart, it’s an incredible movie.

Cold day, huh?

This is the kind of day people like to talk about the weather. If you go out, and make it back without being frostbitten, there is a (justifiable) sense of pride in having achieved something. What, I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps some primal triumph over the elements?

If, like me, you’re not entirely evolutionarily equipped for this sort of weather, you stay indoors drinking hot things, and try not to feel guilty for all the bad environmental karma caused by cranking the heat up. Not to mention the energy bills.

You also ponder the fates that brought you to a place that, today, is colder than some places in Alaska. In the good news, the sun is shining brightly. One of the things I love about this part of the midwest. The wind is cold enough to freeze your eyeballs in their sockets, but the sun placidly shines on like nothing’s going on, like it’s a gentle spring day. Not that it generates heat worth spit, but when you’ve spent weeks with no sun (hello? sub-tropical girl? Must have sun?) you begin to appreciate every winter day that the sun shines, even if it is fraudulent in terms of heat.

According to Weather Underground, the temperature in Tinytown today is -5 °F / -21 °C.

Now add windchill to that (and trust me, you want to, with wind gusts of 16 mph / 26 km/) and the temperature feels like:

-22 F/ -30 C

They’ve issued a wind chill advisory, of course. Frostbite in under 20 minutes if not covered up properly. And some other good advice: if you want to go out today, don’t.

Hope the weather is wonderful wherever you are. If not, stay indoors and read a good book or something. My pick of the day is Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series.

Travel from Hell, courtesy NorthWest

Happy New Year to everyone. I’m going to open this year with a good old-fashioned bitch. As do we all, I’m sure. I don’t know how your travel went this Christmas, but ours was miserable, thanks to some extraordinary inefficiency from NorthWest airlines (with a little help from United). We went to spend break with my in-laws, and the week with them was fun and makes me less grumpy about my vacation. But getting there and coming back – let’s say it was even worse than my so-far-worst-ever-flight, and that was on Royal Jordanian.

We are debating whether to blame, also, whoever it was at the University who decided to add another (completely unnecessary) week of vacation in the summer and let school out a week later in the winter, resulting in everyone trying to leave in this mad rush right before Christmas, when the weather is at its most pissy and the planes are all over-booked. Whoever took that decision – I think you might want to reconsider.

So we’re supposed to leave here one afternoon. It’s foggy as hell. Now I’m from Delhi, and I know what happens to travel plans when it’s foggy. But everyone’s always bitching about how it’s because Delhi airport is so backward, and so I think, well, this is the US of A, technological superpower and all that, it’s got to be better, right?

Wrong. We get to the airport, and there’s a sign on the NorthWest automatic check-in machine that says “All flights from 5 am to 10 am are cancelled”. There’s no line – this is important. My heart sinks, but it’s noon, so I go onward. The guy behind the counter looks at us approaching and shakes his head. He tells us no flights are leaving, but maybe ours will, and so he checks us in. Ten minutes later, I kid you not, they cancel the flight. We go back, and there’s this line now. We stood in that line for a while. The woman behind the counter tells us there are no more flights out until the 24th. Okay, we say, what about the airport at Tinytown? (Little town in Illinois, not too far away). Yup, there’s a flight out of there tonight, at six. So we ask if the flights are running out of Tinytown. Yes, she says.

Now at this point, we’ve already realized that ALL the other airlines are busing people out to their hubs at Chicago, Minneapolis, whatever. Not NorthWest, no. they simply tell people, if you can drive to Minneapolic maybe you can catch your connection there. And no, they don’t offer to refund the first leg either. So we ask if there is a way we could fly out of Chicago, and we think maybe we could drive there, or take the bus. Then we tell her, never mind, give us the ticket for the 24th. She says okay, and gives us boarding passes for the Tinytown flight that evening. Which we don’t notice until we’re gone away to the other end of the airport, and we don’t want to stand in line again.

Okay. Never mind. We can call the NorthWest line, right? So we call, and At&T reception at our local airport sucks, btw. We finally get to speak to a person and they’re like, “yeah, all flights running out of Tinytown on time, yeah no problem”. So we’re thinking, okay, maybe we can do this, and we keep Chicago in mind as a backup plan, and go to the car rental counters. No cars. All gone to Minneapolis or something. Some of them don’t want to do one way rentals. Hello? Land of capitalism? Opportunity to make much money here? But no. Unfriendly “no one-way rentals” signs on all counters. So we say screw you too and call the cab company, who must really love us by this time.

We take a cab to Tinytown. It took us over an hour and $140.00, including the hefty tip we paid the cabbie because visibility was at about ten feet. Now I know the plane can’t take off in this pea soup, but we foolishly decided to believe the guy at the NorthWest call center. Dumbasses. So we get into Tinytown, and there’s this LONG line of people at the NW counter, many of them from our airport, who’ve all apparently been given misinformation by people at NW. We stood in that line for nearly three hours, and we were very upset, let me tell you. We finally get to the counter, and the lady behind it says there are no flights leaving for two days. We manage to get two seats for two days later, and I say “could you tell us something about where we can find a hotel?” Because, you know, we don’t know anyone in Tinytown, IL. Or we thought we didn’t. Since we asked, she gives us a voucher for the Holiday Inn Express, which was probably the cheapest hotel nearby, and with good reason. It was a nasty little hotel that smelt of bleach and some other nasty thing I gladly did not identify. We ate at the restaurant at the regular Holiday Inn nearby, and the people there were really nice, though it’s kind of hard being a vegetarian in a small town.

Anyway, so we spent one miserable night there. Thought we’d watch one of those instant movies on Netflix, but does Netflix work on my Mac? Nooooo, of course not. Are you beginning to see a pattern to this trip? Anyway, turns out my brother-in-law is visiting his girlfriend’s family not too far away, so we spend the next night there and I get to play on a Wii, and kick everyone’s asses at boxing. (Yes, you guys, you can say I flail around till you’re blue in the face, but the fact remains that I kicked your butts in no time. Mwahahaha!)

Then we go back to Tinytown – oh, I forgot to tell you, the flight they put us on was a United flight. So we check in, our plane’s leaving, everything is lovely. We get to Chicago, our plane to my in-laws’ city is late. Of course it is. We finally get in there at around 3 CST. And yes, they did lose our baggage. I now have a 100% record with United – everytime I’ve flown with them they’re lost one (just one) of my bags. So we file a claim, yadda yadda, go home, crash. Bag arrives the next day, we have a great vacation, put on ten pounds each, etc. Time to leave. Get to airport. Flight is an hour late. No problem. Eat something, try to get online, discover the airport charges you to use wi-fi, gasp in disbelief, turn computer off and read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd instead. Far more fun anyway. We had to change flights twice. In Seattle and in Minneapolis. Seattle was great. Log on, check mail, get on flight. Minneapolis. Wi-fi is not free. Again. What is it with you guys? Flight is late. Of course. Leaves at midnight. Call cab and fix a pick-up. Flight finally leaves at 12:30. I couldn’t call the cab company because we were out on the tarmac, and they kept saying “we’re just leaving”. Deception.

Finally get into the home airport. I run out and tell the cabbie, “sorry, we’re just going to get our bags and we’ll be right out”. You know what happens next, right? First, it takes about 20 minutes for them to get the bags onto the carousel. Next (yes, you were right), they lost our bags. Two of the three. We wait until the carousel stops going round and round (with frequent trips to apologize to the cab driver) and then go the NW counter. Again. To stand in line. Again. For an hour. Again. Find we’ve left the baggage claim tickets on the plane. Oops. Thankfully, we had the one bag, so that was good. It was also good that we didn’t lose that bag, because apparently it wasn’t in the system. So if we’d lost that, with no tag and no record of it… Anyway, our bags, along with about twenty other people’s bags, seemed to have stayed in Minneapolis, where the NW staff were clearly in a hurry to go home, and somehow neglected to load about half our bags.

So we stand in line, find our bag records, file a claim (the taxi meter is ticking and he’s been waiting an hour). We get to the taxi and go home. Apologizing, and he’s really nice about it. Cuts us a deal on the waiting time, too.  So we get home, and I spend all of the next day trying to find out where our bags are. Nobody knows. Apparently the NW counter at the airport doesn’t have a phone. This is what the guy at the local airport information line told me, and that can’t possibly be true. I mean, he was clearly stalling me. Anyway, I spent a fruitless day trying to find our bags. Called the NW line again, they called the baggage delivery, who didn’t respond. Okay. I said to myself, “fine, try again tomorrow”.

Sometime between midnight and nine a.m., the baggage delivery guys left the bags – no notice, no phone call – on our porch. Just left them there, unattended, without letting us know. The Other Half woke up, made his coffee, looked out the window idly, and happened to see them.

So NorthWest, you’re the most inefficient airline I’ve ever flown on. I can’t blame the weather on you, but I can and do blame everything else on you. No matter how cheap you are, I will not fly on you again. You’ve sent me a customer survey request, and oh boy am I going to have fun filling it out. I hope someone reads those, and I hope someone reads this: This was my worst flight experience ever. Ever. Period. And I fly a fair amount. Oh yeah, you owe us a hundred and forty dollars, and if by some miracle you do send it to us, don’t you dare send us a flight voucher. I’m serious about the whole no-more-flying-NW thing. Cash or check, please.

P.S. Did I mention that there was a foot of snow in our driveway when we returned? Not to mention drifts three feet high on our porch? That’s how we spent the day after we got back. Not NW’s fault, though. As I said, I won’t blame the weather on them, because I’m nice like that.