Wed 18 Aug 2010
Day 1 – continental flight
Posted by novembreskye under Activities, Travel
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We had a flight to catch to Norfolk va with a connection in Cleveland. We got our taxi at 5:30am – we thought plenty of time for our 7:35 flight. Several things led to our you guessed it – missed flight. 1) forgot to check in beforehand online 2) driver thought he would avoid nonexistent traffic by taking the long circuitous route 3) our flight possibly came in early (must verify that). Apparently continental has a policy that if you don’t check in exactly 45 minutes prior to your flight they have the freedom (despite us having paid for our tickets) to give away our reservation.) So here we were with our 3 kids and no flight. They gave us standby tickets for the next flight out at 8:35am. We agonized over what to do in case of a split and finally decided that the likelihood of all of us (5) getting on the flight was practically nil. They did manage to get 4 of us on and I decided al should go with kids so he could deal with how we would get our butts to dc. We had surmised that driving to dc was probably our best bet (those ct vans look mighty good now but probably difficult to maneuver).
So there I was nervous that I wouldn’t be put on the next flight which would be leaving at 10:35am. The flight attendant (Asian woman) was really helpful. There was an irate woman on the standby list after me (I was top of the list) harassing her. Felt sorry for the flight attendant. At 10:15 she tells me you made the right decision not to do 3 and 2 but 4 and 1 because there’s only one seat available. Hallelujah. I tell her she did a wonderful job and went to board. So my seat is 25c which I think is pretty darn good – aisle seat.
I settle in. Full house. The woman I was dealing with hurries down the aisle looking for someone. I think to myself – oh no – is she going to say sorry we made a mistake, you have to get off. Nope – she says wanna sit in first class? I say hell yeah! (in my head anyway). So I moved on up to first class! Karma – I must have done something right. She could have given this seat to the irate lady but nope she moved me instead – it pays to be nice! I just lectured my kids yesterday on always treating people nicely because it’s good to be nice and you never know how it’s going to help you. Don’t be a jerk unless it moves your agenda forward in some way. If it doesn’t help you in any way to yell – don’t bother. Life is great when it proves you right.
