DL was very understanding last December when my parents dropped off our son at MYR an hour too late- they'd misread his itinerary and our son, who is 20 and really is literate, didn't bother to double-check. The first sign anything was wrong was when my parents got home and realized their mistake. They called us to ask if we'd heard from our son. No.

He finally called from ATL, where he was connecting. He just explained his problem to the gate agent at MYR, who booked him on later flights. Nice of him to finally call and tell us!

My favorite missed-plane story goes back 10 years- I missed my Sabena flight home to EWR (my error) and got onto a Turkish Airlines flight- they were flying from BRU to EWR back then. The in-flight movie was "The Beverly Hillbillies", subtitled in Turkish. Wouldn't have missed that experience for anything.