Yesterday, a massive storm system pushed through the southeast, forcing Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport to ground all outgoing flights and hold all incoming. Fine. I get it. Sometimes you simply can’t fly. And being that Delta owns Hartsfield’s major operations, we all knew that yesterday would be disastrous.
So, Bess and I were able to call Delta and reschedule our connecting flight out of Atlanta as we sat for an extra hour at Pensacola’s airport, right? Well, apparently the storm system was soooooo huge, the phone bank in India they usually send us to at 1-800-221-1212 also shut down. No incoming or outgoing calls. But no worries, Delta’s crack team of desk attendants would be able to assist… not really. We had a ’special’ person at our desk in Pensacola, who I will heretofore refer to lovingly as “Corky”. Corky looked like Patton Oswalt in drag, and carried a lispy speech impediment that made me chuckle out of anger every now and then, because someone gave her overhead speaker announcement rights. (“Flighthh eitthheeennss thitheen theven i-i-i-i-i-thhh bowding zonthesth thwee…”) Brutal. When we approached her for help, she promised she could smile and look pretty, no more. I shit you not.
Her trollish counterpart did bring us ’round the desk to show us that our connecting flight, too, had been delayed. Which, as it turns out, didn’t mean anything, since we missed it anyhow. But hey, whatever, Delta, right? As Corky would tell us later, Delta takes care of its customers, and it is a family oriented company. I’m not sure what the latter implied… perhaps because Bess and I technically are not a family, they would not take care of us? No, really, Corky gave this speech, that, if I hadn’t been forced to put away my laptop, I would have transcribed. She apologized profusely for our tardiness, then proceeded to rub the Delta corporate dong in front of us as if we c…. well, I didn’t care, Bess didn’t care, but people APPLAUDED after her “speech”. As if they were applauding Sylvester the Cat for making it through an alcohol-induced karaoke stab at Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life”.
When we did finally land in Atlanta, and discovered that our plane had come and gone without us, we approached a Delta employee with a group of other people in the same predicament, and waited for her attention. Instead, she stood in front of us, back turned, pointing the offloading passengers of another site to the monitor directly above their heads as they exited, saying simply, “Connecting flights”. Really, Delta? This is what you pay your people for? Corky’s Churchillian slurs beat this woman by yards in terms of customer service. After 10 minutes of trying to be patient, decent people, we cut up front and just yelled at her, “HOW DO WE GET TO DC” or something like that. She casually took her connecting flight finger and pointed to the gate across the way. As if this was her job. To point. I wanted to snap it off and put it on my key chain to show to my children, and my children’s children, like a WWII vet bringing home Edelweiss from a downed SS trooper.
In all, we just made a (not ours) connecting flight and managed to get on the ground in DC past 11pm, 2 hours after our original flight was to have landed. Our luggage is still en route. And while I’ve been through delays, and I’ve suffered stupidity, I’ve never seen chaos and tragedy bang it out in public like I did yesterday at the Atlanta airport, as thousands of others suffered the same retarded regime we did. Never mind the fact that at least 80 percent of the passengers stumbling through Atlanta’s airport are just as fat and stupid as the employees they encounter along the way, two wrongs definitely do not make a right.
Delta needs a customer service overhaul.
