Well fair readers, the trip has started off on quite the wrong foot. For some dumbass reason my flight was through Chicago (for those of you geography got screwed up and I ended up missing my connection.
My original flight from SFO to ORD was supposed to be 136 leaving at 6:50a, however it was delayed due to mechanical problems. I gave up and went to Customer Service to get a flight change once they announced that flight 136 would be 50 minutes late. At first the rep wanted to get me to Los Angeles instead and would have had me in Hong Kong one hour later than planned, and they would upgrade me to first class to LA.
That would have been the sensible thing to do, but there was a catch. If I did that, my checked bags would likely end up going some other route and might make it to HK either earlier or later than I did. However, an option presented itself: Flight 46 to Chicago was leaving in just a few minutes. I could take that and would make the usual schedule, but I would have to be downgraded to coach class to Chicago. Under the pressure I dumbly answered "OK" and had a ticket in hand and was boarding a plane a helped out my baggage situation, but it sounded like a good idea at the time.
As an aside, the rep was pretty cute, I thought. She was Asian, had short straight hair, which was partly dyed, so you had that cool black and reddish
So anyways, it turns out that while we pushed off pretty much on time, we sat around on the runway for 30 minutes waiting to take off and then were delayed a bit more by lack of tailwind and poor weather in Chicago. By the time I got to the gate for the Hong Kong flight it was 5 minutes late and the plane had just backed off.
Went to Customer Service in Chicago to get rescheduled. Getting to any west coast cities in time to catch a flight to HK was out of the question by that time. The only other option would be to continue eastward to London and then on to Hong Kong, arriving Friday mid-morning. While that might be fun, if I did that I would probably arrive dead tired and even more confused as to what time it is. The other option was to stay overnight in Chicago and try for the original flight a day late.
United gave me vouchers for hotel, dinner today, and breakfast tommorow. All I had to do was call the hotel for a pickup and get my bags. Simple enough, right?
use it tommorow maybe), and they were being dicks about the pickup. I kept getting transferred around, and best I could get at last was someone could come by after 8pm. So I went back to Customer Service and she called them up and got the same runaround, so I got two vouchers for cab fare out of it too. By this point I was getting hungry, so I talked my way into an additional meal voucher.
Went and got some pizza at one of the snack bar places. The cashier there was such a scammer, she had me keep adding candy bars and snacks until I was close to the $10 value of the voucher.
By this time they were supposed to have my bags ready (they had to pull them out of the HKG truck manually or something), so I went down to the claim area I was supposed to go to. Nothing was there so I went to the Baggage Service counter. The rep I got couldn't tell if they'd received my bags or not so she dragged me back into the baggage handling area to look around for them. It was kinda cool going around in all the secret airport areas. The have these big tunnels that the baggage trucks go through and dump had to hang around for an hour more until they showed up.
By the time I got outside I found out how nasty the weather was. It was pouring, and there was lots of thunder and lightning. I kinda miss the old warm summer thundershowers from Ohio, but it was really wet here. The taxi pickup area was ankle deep in water, righ up to the curb. The cabbie got his feet wet loading my bags, fortunately he was wearing sandals. As we were leaving the airport a car spun out in a compelte 180 in front of us. The cabbie helpfully honked his horn.
Checking in was uneventful. Called to change my hotel reservation in HK and let some people know that I'm delayed. Have to try calling Bonita when it gets to be morning over there. Tommorow morning I'll head back and try for Hong Kong again!