travel

Air travel is always an adventure. We had a flight Friday evening to Vancouver. We called a Yellow Cab Express/International Cab based in Redwood City at 5:15pm since our flight was at 7:30pm. Let me first say I hate that cab company. These guys have hung up on me several times after I asked them to repeat themselves because I couldnt understand what they were saying. They are also known to distribute coupons that they don't honour.

35 min later he still had not arrived and we started to worry about missing the flight. The guy said he was stuck in traffic at Hillsdale (it takes me less than 35 minutes to walk from there) after we called back. Finally he arrives 40 minutes late and doesn't even get out of the car to get our luggage. Asshole. He gets into the far left lane thinking it's a carpool lane but it's not. It is the slowest moving lane on this section of the 101. Idiot.

Finally we got to the airport. Flight was delayed an hour. Checked in our luggage, passed through security and Simon realized his phone was missing (again... this is already a loaner phone for the one he dropped in the shitter two weeks ago). He had Alaska call the check in desk and they dont have it so he used this extra hour to retrace his steps. No luck.

An hour comes and goes and the plane is still going through some mechanical issues. The door is squeaky apparently. An hour after that they canceled the flight not because of the mechanical issues, which were resolved, but because too much time had passed and the crew was no longer allowed to fly due to safety issues around working hours. Fantastic. We lined up, got rebooked on a flight the next day, then refunded the booze at Duty Free, and headed to the luggage carousel to get the luggage back. What a huge waste of an evening.

7 am the next morning, another cab driver called to say he had found the phone. He said he would leave it at the cab office since he had to pick up another passenger and couldnt take us to the airport for our second attempt at getting to Vancouver. The flight went off without a hitch but we got in too late to make it to the wedding ceremony we were supposed to attend.

Anyways, Simon is now back in the Bay Area and called the company back to arrange to pick up the phone that guy left for him and also to give this fellow a reward. Guess what. The jerk-off of a dispatcher says he doesn't see Simon's phone there and he doesn't know the names of all the cab drivers so he can't put Simon in touch with this nice guy who said his name was Alfredo or something. Guess some other asshole who works there stole the phone after the one honest driver turned it in. The only thing more annoying than traveling by plane is taking cabs.