Three days--three days--of airport hell

Lydia Leftcoast

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Fri Nov-10-06 11:39 AM
Original message

Three days--three days--of airport hell

If all had gone according to plan, I would at this moment be sleeping in a hotel in a provincial Japanese city, looking forward to a board meeting of a professional organization.

Instead, I'm sitting in my apartment in Minneapolis, and I have only myself to blame.

Here's what happened:

I voted early Tuesday morning and then dashed around the apartment making sure that I had everything needed for the trip. The bus and light rail took me to MSP cheaply and efficiently, and by the end of the day, I was relaxing in a motel near the San Francisco Airport, looking forward to a pleasant flight to Tokyo on All Nippon Airways (ANA) the next morning.

I arrived at the international terminal Wednesday morning while the check-in line for ANA was still short, and as I approached the head of the line, I heeded the advice of the quadrilingual (English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean) sign that told passengers to have their passports ready. I took out the leather folder that has traveled with me since about 1985 and decided to page through my passport to see just how many stamps it had.

A glance at the first page filled me with shock, dismay, deep embarrassment, self-recrimination, and a second or two of mindless panic. I think I cried out something inarticulate and primal, such as "Aaarrrgggh!" All the Japanese passengers turned to stare at me with solemn curiosity.

You see, I had somehow grabbed an old passport, one that I didn't even know I still had, one that had expired in 1995, and worse yet, I was next in line. All the possible scenarios were running through my head as I walked up to the counter and explained the situation in Japanese (explaining things in Japanese always seems to work wonders with ANA personnel). With typical ANA customer service, the agent echoed my dismay, summoned a colleague to take over her post, and took me aside to assess the situation further.

At first she assumed that I lived in the Bay Area and had a fighting chance of retrieving my passport before take-off time. When I told her that I lived in Minneapolis, she sadly and apologetically told me what I already knew: I would not be flying to Japan that day. Some tapping on the nearest keyboard revealed that there was space on the next day's flight, so if someone could FedEx my passport out to California by 10:00AM, I could take that flight. After consulting a supervisor in words to soft and rapid for me to follow, she again apologized profusely and told me that she could not rebook me until I was sure I could go. I was to call ANA's toll-free number as soon as I was assured of receiving the correct passport.

Having thanked the ticket agent for her kind attention, I pulled my suitcase and carry-on (carefully packed according to TSA regulations) over to a bank of seats and stared into space for a while, trying to figure out what to do and in what order. Well, obviously, I had to stay in San Francisco at least one more night, so I called the motel that I had just left and asked for my room back. (I don't know how I would have survived that day without my cell phone.)

Okay, was it worth it to travel a day later? The original plan had been to arrive at Narita Airport late on Thursday afternoon (Japan Time = midnight Wednesday CST), spend the first night in Tokyo, and take the bullet train to the site of the Saturday meeting. If I arrived on Friday, it would be just barely possible to reach that city before the trains stopped running for the night. It was an unpleasant prospect, but I was willing to try it.

Now, who could retrieve the passport? Uh, nobody. Nobody but I and the landlord had a key to the apartment. But if Brother Leftcoast, whose office is in the immediately adjacent suburb, could rendezvous with the landlord and find the passport in the chaos of my home office, I'd be all set.

This plan should have worked, but I encountered two major obstacles: tracking down either of my brothers or their wives, and tracking down my landlord. For two hours, I encountered only voice mail on the home phones, office phones, and cell phones of all concerned. Finally, I caught up with John at his office and explained the situation. With typical generosity, he agreed to take the time out of a hectic schedule to get and send off the passport, assuming that either of us could reach the landlord.

Neither of us was having any luck, so I started searching on the Internet for any information that might be useful or encouraging. The information that the San Francisco passport office requires 48 hours to produce a passport was useful, but not encouraging. The information that the deadline for early morning FedEx delivery was 7PM was both useful and encouraging.

Unfortunately, the trip to Japan was effectively cancelled when I finally reached the landlord through the miracles of call forwarding and learned that he was out of town and did not plan to return to Minneapolis until the following day. If Brother Leftcoast didn't pick up the passport until Thursday, I wouldn't receive it until Friday, and thanks to the International Dateline, I wouldn't arrive in Japan until the meeting was nearly over.

There was nothing to do but phone United Airlines and reschedule a Thursday return to Minneapolis. This took longer than anticipated, because the reservation agent was evidently located in India, as indicated by her accent and by the fact that she initially interpreted "tomorrow" to mean Friday instead of Thursday, but we eventually came to an understanding. The next order of business was to e-mail the other board members, tell them what had happened, and send off the report that I would have presented in person. Finally, I cancelled three sets of hotel reservations in Japan.

As you can imagine, I was in a dejected mood as I headed back to the motel, but two bits of information cheered me up a bit. The first was that the price of my Japan Rail Pass is largely refundable. The second came from a phone call to ANA reservations. A young man, American, but obviously trained in courtesy and competence by the Japanese, told me that the ticket from SFO to NRT is good for any time between now and next September, since ANA denied me boarding as opposed to my being a no-show.

I arrived home today (Thursday) at about 7PM, no thanks to the airport shuttle dispatcher, who literally did not know where my neighborhood is, repeatedly confused the name of my street with the name of a famous hotel chain, and put me on the same van as a group of people headed for the downtown hotels. I ended up giving the van driver some lessons in the geography of Minneapolis, as he had never heard of my neighborhood and didn't know which of the city's lakes was which (As Anna Russell was fond of saying, "I'm not making this up, you know.")

Upon hearing the story, my 85-year-old mother commented, "At least you had a nice little trip to San Francisco."

Yeah, three days in airport hell: one day flying to SFO via Denver, another day sitting around in SFO with my cell phone and laptop, and another day flying back from SFO via Denver. At least I have only two hours of jet lag instead of ten.

The morals of this story: 1) Look at your passport before you pack it. 2) If you live alone, make sure that some trusted person has keys to your place. One of my agenda items for this weekend is to get duplicate sets of keys made for my brothers.