Have I ever mentioned how much I hate weather? I really, really do. Nothing will ruin my day faster than bad weather. If you watch the news you know that there was a WICKED snow storm in the north east last Friday. It shut down airports from DC to Boston. Thousands of flights were cancelled. Saturday morning was more of the same.
On top of the weather, it is still spring break and spring training games are still going on. What this means is that we have a LOT of people traveling and not enough flights.
People who were trying to go to the north east turned around and went back to where ever they came from, filling up those flights. People trying to get home to the north east were willing to wait standby on those flights. People who were traveling for spring break or spring training were caught in the middle of this. If you missed your flight you were SOL because we did not have open seats on a later flight. Lines were long and people were frustrated.
My new favorite characteristic of travelers is when the pull out thier ace in the hole "What about on another airline?" First of all, no airline is going to pay for you to fly on a different airline just because you want to. Second, the weather, spring break, spring training phenomenon was not restricted to my airline. ALL airlines were effected by this and NO ONE had room on their flights. I swear to you, all this information did was piss people off MORE!
What this also meant was that it took longer to rebook passengers onto another flight when they missed theirs because they were not happy with their options. This made the lines longer and more people missed their flights. The whole thing snowballed and resulted in me working 15.75 hours on Saturday and 15 hours on Sunday (I am only supposed to work 12.25 hours each day). I did not get a break the first day and every position I had was standing. By Sunday my feet were on fire! I did get to sit some on Sunday, but not much.
Oh yeah, and I actually for the first time EVER thought a passenger was going to HIT me! He was extremely unhappy that his flight was delayed and he was looking for someone to yell at. I was working a position in the lobby directing people to the correct line when he came storming up to me and began screaming at me. I asked him to step back because he was standing too close and he was angry (I couldn't stretch out my arm in the distance between the 2 of us. He complied). I told him I did not know anything about his flight and that I did not have a computer in front of me so I had no way to access any information, but if he just wanted to yell at someone he was welcome to yell at me (For the record this usually works and people stop yelling becuase they really do want results not just to yell). He then took another step towards me and began yelling again. I took a step back and again asked him to maintain a certain distance between us. At that point the ticket counter supervisor stepped between us and began talking to the passenger. You need to know that the passenger was short and I wasn't actually afraid of him, but I did think he might become physical. My supervisor is very tall and big. The passenger did not stop. A team lead came up to see if I was okay. I was fine. This guy didn't even ruffle my feathers, the only reason this story is worth telling is because he was screaming and I thought he might get physical. I still don't know where this guy was trying to go, but the cops were called and the sup threatened not to put the passenger on the plane if he didn't calm down. The cops didn't bother him, but the threat of not being allowed on his plane got him to start holding back. I don't know how it ended because I had to leave to go to my next position.
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