don’t stand-by me

02Jan10

What could possibly go wrong? I thought, in a moment of brazen confidence and remarkable stupidity.  Everyone knows that as soon as those words are uttered, the fate of the endeavor in question has been sealed as a disaster.  This time though, it just sounded SO. GOOD.

Sure, flying standby the weekend before Christmas would be a bit risky, but the benefits were blindingly rewarding.  I’d been offered a “buddy pass” from an airline employee, and the price was less than a third of the regular tickets I’d been finding.  The dates were flexible and easy to change, and, oh yeah, there was also the prospect of flying business class.  After many an experience feeling like an intercontinental deli meat sandwiched between two strangers, I was ready to risk a few hours of waiting around the airport for a shot at the extra legroom and free booze that only business class can offer.

That’s how they made it sound–a few hours of sitting around.  “If you get bumped from the first flight,” they told me, “you just try the next.  It could take a couple attempts, but since you’re alone you should have a good chance.”  I had to settle on a later day than when I really hoped to leave because they don’t always honor “buddy passes”, but I still accepted with enthusiasm.  As of the day before my scheduled flight, I was 11th on the list for 22 available, spacious seats in business class.  (Did you know that they recline to 150 degrees?)  I would fly into Atlanta, and transfer there for Buffalo.  All was going according to plan.

That was, until a huge blizzard hit the entire Eastern seaboard of the US that night.

So apparently, when the flights to New York for hundreds of paying customers get cancelled for bad weather, airlines will try to accomodate them on different flights.  And they will put 22 of those customers on a flight to Atlanta (in business class), and will laugh at someone who thinks they still have a chance to fly with their severely discounted buddy pass.  I called to reschedule my ticket for the next day, and was informed that my chance of boarding would be, “at best, zero.”  Same for the day after that.

Five hours after I’d left that morning, I returned to my apartment with no prospect of leaving any time soon.  Worse still, I discovered that there were only 2 flights a day from Rome to the Eastern US with this company.  This hadn’t been mentioned in the “wait around a few hours part.”  I had wrongly assumed there would have been numerous possibilities throughout the day.

My mother, who expected my presence preferably sometime before Christmas, offered to personally come to Rome just to kick my ass.  “What part of flying without a reservation, in the winter, 4 days before Christmas sounded like a good idea to you?”  Something told me that even having my own TV in my seat wouldn’t be a convincing argument at this point.

I should have just booked the ticket the moment those fateful words–what could possibly go wrong– passed through my head.  Instead I spent my expected day of departure poring over travel websites, hoping to find a ticket that wouldn’t require me to pool my checking and savings account, plus two credit cards.  I cried a little as I pressed “make payment,” but it paid off the next day.

When I arrived for Airport Attempt #2, I saw that the flights from the original company had again been cancelled.  But me and the most expensive coach ticket in the world just breezed past the line of stranded and disgruntled passengers and headed to New York.  Maybe I didn’t get my own personal TV, and I couldn’t recline lest I found myself in the lap of the gentleman to my rear, but it was better than still sitting around the airport.  Plus, we’d been delayed an hour, so they even gave us deli-meats in the back the wine for free.  I’d say it worked out as well as possible.

Still, this experience was not without its lessons.  First, I’ve been able to rule out gambling and investing as potential career paths.  Risk-taking is not my thing.  Second, and maybe more importantly, flying standby in the winter, 4 days before Christmas is not as fantastic of an idea as it probably sounds.  Who would have guessed?

(Oh, and if free alcoholic beverages are really important to you, just fly with a non-American company.  Just sayin’.)

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