![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mostly I guess I am suffering from pique, a pique of outrage, and I'm almost too tired now to sustain it. Almost. Not quite...
So we were an hour out of Dallas/Ft Worth, heading for Heathrow, when the pilot comes on the intercom and announces that they have a problem affecting at least one of the navigational computers, and never mind that there are back-ups, he's going to turn around and take us back to DFW and get it fixed. It's not an emergency, he says, it's a maintenance issue, but none the less. No argument, I think, from any of us.
So an hour back again, and we sit on the tarmac for two hours more while the engineers fix the problem: still in the plane, they won't let us off. What they do let us do is observe the fat cats in business class being plied with constant alcohol, it's total happy hour in there and they drew back all the screens to let us see it; meanwhile we in cattle class don't even get a drink of water. They tell us once that we will, water or fruit juice, but it never materialises. I do understand that the price differential demands a different level of service between business and cattle classes - but that doesn't justify the utter neglect of we-the-cattle, just to underscore the difference. No it does not.
And then once we were on our way again and dinner came at last, four hours late, they still bloody charged me for a bloody glass of wine. I am keeping the receipt, as a monument to narrow-mindedness. If I didn't have frequent-flyer miles vested with the firm, it would be all I kept of American Airlines. Well, that and the extremely nasty taste in my mouth.
Oh, and when we landed at Heathrow they presented me with a new-minted boarding-card for my revised onward connection - but had somehow not entered it into the system, so security thought I was trying to slip by them with a fake, which gave me a nasty five minutes...
So we were an hour out of Dallas/Ft Worth, heading for Heathrow, when the pilot comes on the intercom and announces that they have a problem affecting at least one of the navigational computers, and never mind that there are back-ups, he's going to turn around and take us back to DFW and get it fixed. It's not an emergency, he says, it's a maintenance issue, but none the less. No argument, I think, from any of us.
So an hour back again, and we sit on the tarmac for two hours more while the engineers fix the problem: still in the plane, they won't let us off. What they do let us do is observe the fat cats in business class being plied with constant alcohol, it's total happy hour in there and they drew back all the screens to let us see it; meanwhile we in cattle class don't even get a drink of water. They tell us once that we will, water or fruit juice, but it never materialises. I do understand that the price differential demands a different level of service between business and cattle classes - but that doesn't justify the utter neglect of we-the-cattle, just to underscore the difference. No it does not.
And then once we were on our way again and dinner came at last, four hours late, they still bloody charged me for a bloody glass of wine. I am keeping the receipt, as a monument to narrow-mindedness. If I didn't have frequent-flyer miles vested with the firm, it would be all I kept of American Airlines. Well, that and the extremely nasty taste in my mouth.
Oh, and when we landed at Heathrow they presented me with a new-minted boarding-card for my revised onward connection - but had somehow not entered it into the system, so security thought I was trying to slip by them with a fake, which gave me a nasty five minutes...