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The worst experience I had was trying to fly to Dallas/Fort Wort on Continental Airlines with a group of 27 college students. The saga began at 5 am. The day was dawning beautifully. We boarded the plane right on schedule, buckled our seat belts, and prepared for the flight. Then an announcement was made: we were to get off the plane. I looked for the flight attendant to inquire as to what was going on, but she was nowhere to be seen. My friend Joel had seen her, however. "She looked bad. Really bad. I am worried about her," he said. Indeed she must have looked bad, for shortly the paramedics arrived and wheeled her away on a stretcher. Apparently she knew, as we were to know shortly thereafter, that she was the only available Continental Airlines flight attendant for the whole of Huntsville metro that day, and came to work in spite of what appeared to be a bad case of E.Coli.

Yes, there was only one flight attendant that day, so we had a gate full of students and a perfectly useful plane that could not move an inch. Actually it could: it had to be flown in to Dallas, but without us, because of the FAA regulation that every flight must have an attendant. They gave us Subway vouchers. The women behind the counter were so disturbed at the sudden influx of business that they announced, "The teachers can pick what they want, and the kids can have ham sandwiches and Sprite." The kid at the front of the line responded that he was twenty-four, and he would like a tuna salad and a lemonade, which set the precedent for all us youngsters, who put the the unfortunate workers through a trying ordeal of doing their job continuously for 30 minutes.

All this time our professor was at the desk, working with the agent to find us another plane, any plane, that would take us somewhere where we could find a way to Leon, Mexico. Cincinnati, then to Atlanta. Or to Mexico City, followed by a four-hour bus ride. A herd of donkeys, trekking through the mountains. The agent, equally enthused about having to work so continuously, felt the need to be suddenly called away, so Dr. A got behind the counter herself, on the phone to the main office. For a little while there, she was the most efficient worker of all the Continental Airlines staff.

To shorten this long tale of woe, I will say we eventually boarded an American Airlines plane to Texas, arriving far too late to catch our connecting flight, but just in time to miss the latest hotel shuttle (the hotel being complementary, of course). After waiting a good deal longer than I thought necessary, one small shuttle pulls up. The driver looks at the smallness of the shuttle, looks at 27 people and their luggage, and drives away. In the end, however, through a miraculous feat of engineering and skill that can only be derived from years of cramming people and luggage into tiny shuttles, a few drivers managed to fit all of us into three of them.

The last bit of this complaint comes from the food vouchers. As a token of their appreciation, the airline gave us vouchers, useful for the dates of May, 2005; April, 2006; and April of 2005. This would not have been a problem had we not been traveling in May of 2006, rendering them effectively useless. And as the dates had been written in by hand, I suspect it was deliberate.

Luckily we finally arrived at destination, though a day and a half late. The moral of this story is, if your only flight attendant comes down with food poisoning, you are in trouble.

Learn more about this author, Kat Derrig.
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