The flight attendants are underemployed. They could be making big money running the SERE program at Gitmo.

This keeping people on the plane has got to stop.

Now I’m getting nervous because, unexpectedly, I have to fly to Baltimore next week to help out my mother. Of course, I don’t plan to fly anything but Southwest (which has suffered some deterioration of its great rep, but still muuuuuuch better than USAir or Cont.), but still, this makes me nervous.

$115,050 at time of this post.

She’s not on the front page at the moment, raising money for health care reform is a more urgent priority.

The last time I flew them was a flight from Harrisburg, PA, to Philadelphia to make an AA connection to Miami to connect to La Paz. The flight from Harrisburg was delayed over an hour because some jerk was changing a tire on the plane and took his good ol’ time about it. He was doing it right in front of the waiting lounge and everyone was watching him, but he and his buddy just sat there shooting the breeze. I asked the USAIR people if I could still make my flight. “Oh, yes!” they assured me.

We left Harrisburg at almost exactly the time that my AA flight started to load. On the flight I asked the stewardess to call ahead and ask the flight to wait a couple minutes. She refused and said that they already had everything in the computer. She didn’t even try to alert them. We got into Philly at the time my AA flight was scheduled to take off. There were no USAIR people waiting to help me get my flight or even direct me to where I should go. The stewardess was worthless because she had never been in the terminal. “Oh, I don’t get off the flight.”

I ran like hell and got to the AA gate in time to watch it pull out onto the runway. When I went to complain at USAIR, they first told me that the people in Harrisburg should not have let me get on the plane. Finally I got them to give me a voucher for a night in a hotel and a meal. Their vouchers were less than the cheapest meal the hotel offered. The phone card they gave me had no money left on it. Then they put me on one of their own flights the next day so that I lost miles with my AA account. And of course, I got into La Paz a day late.

When I complained to the head office and wanted reimbursed for my expenses, all they would do was give me a $75 travel voucher that was useless to me because they didn’t fly anywhere near my home. They refused to try to instate my air miles with AA. They refused everything. When I read that they were having so much difficulty after 9/11, well, schadenfreude.