The Airline Ticket

I want to get to California in the very worst way so I’m flying Southwest Airlines…

Every August I fly from Kansas City to Sacramento to spend time with my mom on her birthday and every time I leave Sacramento I hug my mom and think it might be the last time I ever see her.

But I’ve been making this trip and thinking that morbid thought ever since she turned 90 and this year she’ll be 99 so I’m starting to think if it’s the last time I see her it’ll be because I kicked the bucket, not her.

Apparently, my mom has no plans to go anywhere – including Heaven – maybe because I ruined it for her the time she told me she couldn’t wait to enter the Pearly Gates and see my dad again and spend Eternity with him and I said:

“He was married three times, how do you know you were his favorite?”

I’d like to think my dad is up there currently having cocktails and playing shuffle board with a young Myrna Loy – as you can see she was smoking hot – and maybe my mom’s arrival is going to screw things up for my dad and Myrna.

Another observation my elderly mother didn’t find all that humorous, but whenever she complains about one of her children’s character flaws (and she has a wide variety to choose from) I’ll point out that she raised us, so she’s really complaining about her own parenting skills.

“Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a smartass child” and I’m pretty sure Shakespeare wrote that or maybe it’s from the Bible or a fortune cookie and I recently realized despite a lifetime of Chinese food takeout I’ve never gotten the same fortune from a fortune cookie twice, which means there’s probably some poor slob working at gunpoint in a Hong Kong sweatshop coming up with enough pithy sayings to cover every single Chinese takeout meal in America and I had Chinese food last night and the fortune cookie said: “Trust your heart. It’s never wrong.”

A sentiment Woody Allen’s ex-wives and girlfriends might disagree with.

Anyway…

So this year I thought maybe I should plan ahead because I know I’m going to Sacramento and I know when I have to be there, so why not book my airplane ticket early and get a good price and if at all possible, a flight that goes in a semi-straight line to California and doesn’t change planes in Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

Southwest, The Gambler’s Choice In Airlines

I tend to use Southwest Airlines mainly because of their baggage policy (trust me, I’ve got some baggage) and two bags fly free and if you’ve got a good mother-in-law joke, now would be the time to use it.

I also use Southwest because even though they often tend to be a disorganized mess, at least I know that and what to expect and that I’m going to have  to check my own bag (which is OK because I plan on giving myself a generous tip) and will then have to reenact the Oklahoma Land Rush to get my seat on the airplane and hopefully I won’t be next to a circus fat man on vacation or someone unfamiliar with deodorant or a squabbling couple, which reminds me I once flew Southwest to New York in a middle seat and eventually realized the man on my right and the woman on my left were married and in a fight and not speaking to each other and when the flight attendant asked what we wanted to drink, the woman on my left turned to me and said:

“You can ask him what he wants to drink.”

To which the man on my right replied:

“You can tell her I don’t want anything.”

But it all worked out OK because I charged them $150 an hour for marriage counseling which I’m totally unqualified to do, but come to think of it, that’s also true of my political cartooning career and reminds me of the Playboy cartoon (I only read it for the articles) that showed two prisoners sitting in a cell and one of them says:

“So I figured if I was going to practice medicine without a license, why not be a gynecologist?”

(And if you find that joke tasteless and sexist, I’d suggest sending Playboy a stern letter complaining about a cartoon they published four decades ago, and also reminds me that in the Good Old Days if you wanted to complain you had to make an effort and find a piece of paper, an envelope, a stamp and a crayon to write with and then bribe an attendant of whatever mental institution you were in to mail your letter of complaint.)

In any case…

As I’m trying to make clear, I thought I understood the Southwest Airlines lack of frills and level of incompetence, but subsequent events made me realize I actually had no idea just how screwed up Southwest Airlines could be when given extra time to make a mess of things.

Just A Slight Change in Plans

So I’m scheduled to fly from Kansas City to Sacramento connecting through Denver, but then get an email from Southwest that there’s been a slight change in my schedule and now I’m flying from San Jose to Austin and the flight’s going to take 22 hours and 45 minutes.

Which, all things considered seems pretty unlikely unless someone’s hijacking the flight to Cuba and I’m going to spend one fabulous night in Havana, watching cockfights and drinking Pina coladas with Fredo Corleone, which, come to think of it, I might find enjoyable.

(I had to keep the “cockfight” bit to make the joke work, but in reality I wouldn’t enjoy watching chickens fight, although I’ve eaten my fair share of Kentucky Fried Chickens and if you think those birds were “killed humanely” you probably haven’t spent much time in a slaughterhouse.)

So…

I call Southwest Airlines to straighten things out and the robot that answers the phone wants my six-character confirmation code which I give it, but then the robot tells me that code doesn’t exist and after three attempts the robot repeats the code I’ve been trying to give it and I realize when I said “A” the robot thought I was saying “8.”

When I finally get a human to talk to, I tell her about the mix up and say maybe they need to get their robot a hearing aid or quit using “A” in their confirmation codes and she says:

“Our robots aren’t the smartest.”

She also says sorry their computer has been “wonky” (I assume that’s a technical term used by IT people and witch doctors) and apologizes for the mix up and that she’ll send me an email with the right information immediately and I get another email saying “your change has been confirmed” but it’s the same exact email as the one before it and I’m still going from San Jose to Austin on a 22 hour and 45 minute flight so maybe they’re now planning on parting ways with yet another Boeing jetliner part somewhere over Oklahoma and we’ll have to stop overnight in Tulsa and send out a search party to find it.

I say to hell with it, I’ll worry about all that later, which if I recall correctly, is the exact same thought process we used when we decided to fight the war in Vietnam and we all know how well that went.

But Then I Get Yet Another Email

Then Southwest sends me another email informing me that there has been yet another change in my August travel schedule and I’m thinking they’re creating these new flight schedules with the use of a calendar, a map of the United States and throwing darts because even though I booked and paid for a return flight from Sacramento to KC with a stop in Denver that left Sacramento at 10:30 AM and took four hours and 45 minutes to get me home, Southwest has now announced I’m actually leaving Sacramento at 6:45 AM (a mere three hours and 45 minutes earlier and won’t be in any way inconvenient) and am now flying to Los Angeles to change planes and then to Albuquerque and then on to KC and will spend approximately eight hours and 35 minutes making the trip.  

(Man, that sentence was longer than the one Donald Trump will get for 34 felonies.)

So I call Southwest for the third time and this time the robot remembers me and my confirmation code and I get a human and ask if there isn’t a more convenient flight that doesn’t take off at the buttcrack of dawn and visit Nova Scotia for a curling tournament on its way to Kansas City and turns out there’s a flight way more convenient that I’m guessing they were hoping I was too dumb to ask about.

(I get the feeling they had a really inconvenient flight and few people wanted to be on it, so they were filling it up with suckers too spineless to complain.)

Currently, everything is OK, but I’m not flying for almost three months which gives Southwest plenty of extra time to screw up my schedule and now I’m starting to think I’m part of some Southwest Airline Employee prank like in Super Troopers when they repeatedly slip in the word “meow” during a traffic stop:

The Case For Government Regulation

As you may have discovered on your own, airlines are totally free to sell you one flight and then cancel it or change it and send you to cities you never wanted to visit at times you never wanted to be there, so it’s like reserving a rental car and when you arrive to pick it up, they say they ran out of cars and here’s what Seinfeld had to say about that:

“That government is best which governs least” has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but if you go to the Monticello.org website they say Jefferson never said it, so it was probably made up by someone who wanted to pollute the environment or cheat on his taxes or sell plane reservations and change passengers’ flights whenever they feel like it and according to the internet here’s what former CEO of American Airlines, Robert Crandall, had to say about airline deregulation:

“Our airlines, once world leaders, are now laggards in every category, including fleet age, service quality and international reputation. Fewer and fewer flights are on time. Airport congestion has become a staple of late-night comedy shows. An even higher percentage of bags are lost or misplaced. Last-minute seats are harder and harder to find. Passenger complaints have skyrocketed. Airline service, by any standard, has become unacceptable.”

I think most of us would concede that you can have too much government regulation, but you can also have too little and I’ll keep you updated on Southwest Airlines latest shenanigans and should things go really haywire, send you a postcard from Angkor Wat, Cambodia.