da | Dear Southwest Airlines, (Reply)

Thank you so much for the 14-hour layover in Las Vegas. So sure, Southwest is slightly annoying that we don't have reserved seats, but queueing up over the last two days has been so much fun. Not only that; I just enjoyed every other moment on our two-day Oakland -> Las Vegas -> hotel -> Las Vegas -> Chicago -> Buffalo odyssey.

All the way from:

SWA telling us in Oakland, no, the 30-minute delay won't cause problems when we get to Las Vegas, they don't need to put us on the (same) flight just leaving, we don't need to worry about our connection to Buffalo, because y'know, it's an hour layover. which turned out to be ten minutes too short.
before landing in Las Vegas: don't worry about connecting flights; if they're the last flight of the day they'll hold the plane (except in our case).
coming out of our connecting flight: yes, the plane is still at the gate; that's all they can tell us even though it's the same damn airline;
Oh, oops, they couldn't hold the flight for the four of us making that connection, because Buffalo is under construction and they couldn't save the spot. Oops.

...so there we were in Las Vegas, which you may recall I previously described as hell. We made an evening of it, which was an OK adventure I'll tell more about in a bit, then this morning's escape from hell included: electronic tickets that didn't exist, bodily fluids at the check-in desk, lines from Dante's 3rd circle or maybe 4th, stewing for an hour to get to our gate only to discover then that it had been delayed 30 minutes (gee, where did we see that before?); and finally a flatulant seat-mate.

Most of the joy has been the incorrect information they fed us. It continues: once at Midway (again 30 minutes late on a 1-hr connection) running to that gate to determine the other signs were lying and we were delayed an hour leaving Chicago as well, having an agent tell us yes we had enough time to go and get ourselves a real lunch; having that delay retracted ("this is a final boarding call for flight... to Buffalo") when we were a ten freakin' minute all-out run from the terminal away, then once we got onto that plane, just before takeoff, drama involving a passenger who wouldn't (couldn't) sit and said he needed an exit-row seat because he physically couldn't fit into a regular seat, being seven feet tall; and just shy of security forcably removing him from the plane a woman gave up her exit-row seat.

From there, things were fine, including some welcome suprises. We got to Buffalo and so did our baggage (surprise number one; they checked the bags plane-side when they ran out of room in Las Vegas; I was totally convinced they were left behind in our nth delay-dash at Midway). We drove from Buffalo in very reasonable time (considering rush-hour) and we retrieved the pup after the normal closing hours of Country Paws (who, in fact, rock) and now we're home.

I'm just glad I only missed one planned event today (sorry 'bout that sfllaw).

And tomorrow's gonna be tough, but I expect I'll make it to work in the morning anyway.