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It's always an adventure when I use air travel.
Many people will remember what happened the last time I moved internationally: during an effort to clear up some issues with the legalities of my visa, I was detained by UK border patrol and then redirected to Italy, where I was temporarily arrested by the Polizia di Stato.
On all subsequent flights into the UK, I have been detained while they figured out why I was detained in the first place.
On one notable outbound occasion, I sat next to Giancarlo Esposito (Once Upon a Time, Breaking Bad, and Revolution) and talked to him about his family and the documentary he was filming.
At least when I was detained, it made for a hilarious story.
This is by far the worst experience I've ever had with an airline or an airport. By far. It ends with me giving a steady stream of the various grammatical forms of the word "fuck" while being patted down by a humming TSA agent.
It starts with a cat.
Alice has traveled with me from the US to Italy, from Italy to the UK. I have never had a problem getting her on to an airline, and upon arriving at Heathrow yesterday morning (a trip which began at 4:00 a.m. GMT, or 11:00 p.m. EST the previous night) we had no issues. The staff for American Airlines took her, inspected her, scanned her kennel, and told us she would be checked through to Reagan Airport in Washington D.C. We parted ways with her at the check-in desk.
Getting through security at Heathrow was amazingly easy. I happened to be wearing a shirt with metal bits on it and set off the scanner, and I willingly went through the new body imagine scanning system afterwards. It was quick and painless, non-invasive, and we were through in ten minutes.
Then shit started going downhill. Our plane was forty-five minutes late getting in.
Fast-forward through seven hours of extremely rude flight attendants and one group of horny, middle-aged Greek women and their cult leader later (some other time, I'll go into more detail) and we arrive at JFK in New York for our connecting flight. Remember, we're forty-five minutes late and thus only have 50 minutes to get our bags, re-check them, get through security, and get on the flight to Reagan.
They gave us back the cat.
No one at baggage claim could tell us where to go with her, and the men at the baggage check wouldn't take her. We were directed to person after person, until finally we were upstairs at the American Airlines check-in desk, talking to a clerk who called not one, not two, not three times, but four times for someone to come take the cat to the plane. Thirty minutes until take-off. Our plane is already boarding and we haven't gone through security.
The individual with the clearance to take her to the tarmac finally comes strolling up like he's on a fucking holiday and follows us to security, where they proceed to tell my husband that he has to take the zip ties off the crate. The clearly-marked TSA zip-ties. The ones THEY PUT ON THE CRATE IN HEATHROW. They want him to take them off with the sharp object he's not allowed to have whilst going through security.
While he's arguing with the TSA agent, I'm stopped because of that metal bit on my shirt...only the imaging scanners are all "broken". So they refuse to let me go to another line to have it done, then hold me there while they call for a female security staffer to come physically pat me down. Five minutes later, they call her again and she finally shows and proceeds to give me the most invasive pat-down I have ever received (and with the amount that I travel, I have had many.)
If you want to bitch about a violation of privacy, this is where you can start. To be denied your choice of a body imaging scanner and a physical pat-down is an invasion of your civil liberties.
At this point, we have been traveling for something close to 14 hours.
We finally got through security with ten minutes to spare until our plane was scheduled to take off. We ran the half-mile from security to the gate and made it on that plane with just enough time for the flight attendant to tell us off for holding them up and fifty passengers to glare at us for delaying them.
The plane was delayed anyway because they hadn't even finished loading the bags when they shut the doors.
Mike begged the AA flight attendant for a glass of water because running a half-mile at full tilt while carrying carry-on luggage is exhausting. She proceeded to tell him she'd get to it when she could, then went to the front of the plane and poured a glass of water for herself and drank it where he could see. Only then did she get him some water.
When we arrived at Reagan, our plane sat on the tarmac for forty-five minutes because no gates were available. When we finally got off, no one could tell us where to pick up Alice or whether she had even made it on the plane.
The only bright spot (and forgive me my schadenfreude) was that the cow of a flight attendant missed her deadhead flight to Chicago by two minutes. And yes, after the shit AA put us through, after 16 hours of incompetence and rudeness, I will take some small pleasure from that.
We talked to a manager for about fifteen minutes, laying out everything that had happened to us thanks to American Airlines.
And when we went to baggage claim, we found they had got our cat on the plane...but not Mike's luggage.
I tried to think of a way to type this all out and somehow make it funny, but it wasn't. This experience was worse than being detained by border control. On a scale of one to shit's fucking awful, I'm going for shit's fucking awful.
The only thing I can say is if TSA thinks I'm a terrorist, the security of this country is fucked.
Not pictured: Terrorism
More to the point, if i was planning on hijacking some puddle-jumping jet, I wouldn't take my cat with me.
Many people will remember what happened the last time I moved internationally: during an effort to clear up some issues with the legalities of my visa, I was detained by UK border patrol and then redirected to Italy, where I was temporarily arrested by the Polizia di Stato.
On all subsequent flights into the UK, I have been detained while they figured out why I was detained in the first place.
On one notable outbound occasion, I sat next to Giancarlo Esposito (Once Upon a Time, Breaking Bad, and Revolution) and talked to him about his family and the documentary he was filming.
At least when I was detained, it made for a hilarious story.
This is by far the worst experience I've ever had with an airline or an airport. By far. It ends with me giving a steady stream of the various grammatical forms of the word "fuck" while being patted down by a humming TSA agent.
It starts with a cat.
Alice has traveled with me from the US to Italy, from Italy to the UK. I have never had a problem getting her on to an airline, and upon arriving at Heathrow yesterday morning (a trip which began at 4:00 a.m. GMT, or 11:00 p.m. EST the previous night) we had no issues. The staff for American Airlines took her, inspected her, scanned her kennel, and told us she would be checked through to Reagan Airport in Washington D.C. We parted ways with her at the check-in desk.
Getting through security at Heathrow was amazingly easy. I happened to be wearing a shirt with metal bits on it and set off the scanner, and I willingly went through the new body imagine scanning system afterwards. It was quick and painless, non-invasive, and we were through in ten minutes.
Then shit started going downhill. Our plane was forty-five minutes late getting in.
Fast-forward through seven hours of extremely rude flight attendants and one group of horny, middle-aged Greek women and their cult leader later (some other time, I'll go into more detail) and we arrive at JFK in New York for our connecting flight. Remember, we're forty-five minutes late and thus only have 50 minutes to get our bags, re-check them, get through security, and get on the flight to Reagan.
They gave us back the cat.
No one at baggage claim could tell us where to go with her, and the men at the baggage check wouldn't take her. We were directed to person after person, until finally we were upstairs at the American Airlines check-in desk, talking to a clerk who called not one, not two, not three times, but four times for someone to come take the cat to the plane. Thirty minutes until take-off. Our plane is already boarding and we haven't gone through security.
The individual with the clearance to take her to the tarmac finally comes strolling up like he's on a fucking holiday and follows us to security, where they proceed to tell my husband that he has to take the zip ties off the crate. The clearly-marked TSA zip-ties. The ones THEY PUT ON THE CRATE IN HEATHROW. They want him to take them off with the sharp object he's not allowed to have whilst going through security.
While he's arguing with the TSA agent, I'm stopped because of that metal bit on my shirt...only the imaging scanners are all "broken". So they refuse to let me go to another line to have it done, then hold me there while they call for a female security staffer to come physically pat me down. Five minutes later, they call her again and she finally shows and proceeds to give me the most invasive pat-down I have ever received (and with the amount that I travel, I have had many.)
If you want to bitch about a violation of privacy, this is where you can start. To be denied your choice of a body imaging scanner and a physical pat-down is an invasion of your civil liberties.
At this point, we have been traveling for something close to 14 hours.
We finally got through security with ten minutes to spare until our plane was scheduled to take off. We ran the half-mile from security to the gate and made it on that plane with just enough time for the flight attendant to tell us off for holding them up and fifty passengers to glare at us for delaying them.
The plane was delayed anyway because they hadn't even finished loading the bags when they shut the doors.
Mike begged the AA flight attendant for a glass of water because running a half-mile at full tilt while carrying carry-on luggage is exhausting. She proceeded to tell him she'd get to it when she could, then went to the front of the plane and poured a glass of water for herself and drank it where he could see. Only then did she get him some water.
When we arrived at Reagan, our plane sat on the tarmac for forty-five minutes because no gates were available. When we finally got off, no one could tell us where to pick up Alice or whether she had even made it on the plane.
The only bright spot (and forgive me my schadenfreude) was that the cow of a flight attendant missed her deadhead flight to Chicago by two minutes. And yes, after the shit AA put us through, after 16 hours of incompetence and rudeness, I will take some small pleasure from that.
We talked to a manager for about fifteen minutes, laying out everything that had happened to us thanks to American Airlines.
And when we went to baggage claim, we found they had got our cat on the plane...but not Mike's luggage.
I tried to think of a way to type this all out and somehow make it funny, but it wasn't. This experience was worse than being detained by border control. On a scale of one to shit's fucking awful, I'm going for shit's fucking awful.
The only thing I can say is if TSA thinks I'm a terrorist, the security of this country is fucked.
Not pictured: Terrorism
More to the point, if i was planning on hijacking some puddle-jumping jet, I wouldn't take my cat with me.