As i write this I am sitting on the floor against a wall in Toronto's cavernous new Terminal 1 at Pearson airport.
lords of the realm 3.zipIt's 3:30 in the morning. Somehow a flight to Ottawa has ended up taking me all night. Right now, there's an annoying medium flat tone being emitted from the PA system; it's fairly loud, although at least not at a pitch to make your teeth hurt, but its giving me an earache nonetheless.
Stranded in Toronto.
OMFG, the pitch of the tone has gone up an octave. If I actually felt like sleeping, I wouldn't be able to anyway.
I was supposed to leave New York on an Air Canada flight at 8:30PM and get into Ottawa around 10:30, which was already a drag after a full, deadline-is-looming kind of day at work. Then the flight to Ottawa gets cancelled and I spend a stressful half hour waiting in line to get rerouted through Toronto, and dash immediately onto the waiting plane.
The plane then immediately taxis out of the gate and shuts down for an hour while we wait to take off.
OK, fine, we finally get going. When we get close to Toronto, two hours later, the flight attendant comes on to inform us that we will have a half hour to clear customs and dash to the waiting flight to Ottawa. Somebody will be waiting at the gate to help us along, supposedly.
So we pour out of the gate and... there's nobody there. Nobody knows what the gate is. A cleaning guy finally tells us that we have to take a shuttle to the other terminal. We get to the other terminal. Where's the gate? Security doors are locked. It appears we have missed the flight. There are about 100 passengers standing around and not a single living Air Canada employee within a mile. Some guy won't shut his yap about his NGO work in Sierra Leone and I think that if this were to stretch on for a week and become Alive, he'd be an early candidate for culling so we wouldn't have to listen to his whiny Canadian accented bullshit anymore, but we wouldn't eat the bastard just to spite him.
After a couple of hours of waiting in line, I've got a boarding pass for 7AM to Ottawa. At this point its 3AM, so it wouldn't be worth it to go to a hotel anyway, even if they would give me a room, except they won't because I booked through United. I could point out that it wasn't United's incompetence that had me sitting on the tarmac for an hour and wandering around looking for my flight with these dopes like we're the crew of the fucking Minnow on the island for the first time, but it's late, I'm exhausted and I don't have the heart to yell at this lady who has to take a metric ton (it's Canada, after all) of shit every day for what is obviously a doomed operation.
I need a drink, but the bar is closed. Damnit.