"Horrible nightmare?" Puh-leez.

Let me tell you what a horrible nightmare looks like.

I was headed to Boise, ID once. My co-workers and I got the last seats on a flight out of Manchester, but there was a fellow from a partner company who showed up 5 minutes later and was told that the flight was overbooked by 40 seats due to an equipment change and they couldn't check him in. This was the last connection from Manchester, NH, to ORD. Not good.

They offer to put him and 30 other souls on a bus to Boston (1 hour away) which in theory will allow him to still make it to Idaho late that night. So he rides this bus and gets a flight headed to DEN.

Somewhere over the great plains, one of the hydraulic systems goes Tango Uniform. This disabled a number of systems so the pilot informed them that while they were still going to DEN, they would need to be towed in after landing and not to get worried if they saw emergnecy vehicles on the ground, it was just "standard procedure."

The landing seemed to go without incident, but when the tug showed up to pull them to the gate, they couldn't get the airplane to move. After 30 minutes of waiting on the runway, they realized that the brakes on the plane had locked on landing, blowing out several tires and rendering the plane unmoveable. They waited 60 minutes while buses and a boarding stair were brought out so they could at least get off that plane.

By now, he missed his connection- you guessed it, the last one to Boise. As a matter of fact, so had nearly everyone else on that 757. One by one the passenegers were processed and after standing in line for half an hour, he gets rebooked and a voucher for a room and a meal. He boards the airport tram to head to the hotel.

He gets there (it's now 2am and he's been on the road, oh, 12 hours) and guess what? Everyone else from that 757 was in line with the one guy at the check-in desk trying to keep the crowd from eating him. After 20 minutes in that line, the desk clerk yells out,

"I have one room left, it's a 3-bed suite, are there any single travelers who would like to share it?"

So this fellow leaps forward and grabs this last chance at a bed. He shares the room with two strangers, getting up at 5am for a 7am flight without showering.

He shows up at the airport, and they tell him the flight was cancelled. They offer to book him on the next flight, which leaves at noon.

Our meeting started at 9am. He asks if they can just send him back to Manchester. They say, "well, you'd have to pay more, this ticket originated in Boston and that would be an itinerary change."

He manages to somehow avoid committing murder on the spot. A phone call is made, and the agent figures out that this fellow's journey began in Manchester. After some wrangling they find a way to get him back, but it requires connecting in ORD. The flight from ORD to MHT gets delayed by an hour, and 30 hours after he started, he finally lands in Manchester, having never made it to the client.

Now that, my friend, is the color, shape, and size of a horrible nightmare.

-cwk.

PS- They completely lost one of his bags, too.