Humiliation V
 

Has a year passed already? Although a young community, Flyertalk is steeped in tradition. One of our cherished traditions is to cyberly gather at the end of each year and play Humiliation to expose ourselves to ridicule. And, with so many new Flyertakers, there is so much more opportunity for ridicule.

The game is played by sharing your worst travel related error or miscalculation. Examples might include: forgetting to pack your suit for that job interview; getting arrested by TSA for an off-handed joke; flying a million miles before enrolling in a frequent flyer program; crashing your rental car into your bosses new BMW at a sales’ meeting. I fondly recall last year’s champion who, unable to convince security that her sweater was outerwear, passed the metal detector in only a bra. For some reason, stories that include female nudity or semi-nudity seem to score very high.

Previous incarnations of this game can be viewed at:

http://flyertalk.com/forum/showthrea...ht=Humiliation

http://flyertalk.com/forum/showthrea...ht=Humiliation

http://flyertalk.com/forum/showthrea...ht=Humiliation

http://flyertalk.com/forum/showthrea...ht=Humiliation


Humiliation is traditionally played in the Community Forum instead of OMNI because it is an old-fashioned parlor game. And, as in all games, a winner is declared. So, I ask for Moderator Indulgence, and that the game be allowed to play out in its historical forum.

This year, the Humiliation Board of Trustees has expanded the game to include not only your biggest travel faux pas, but the biggest travel stupidity that you have witnessed by others. This means that you can nark on your associates as well as out yourself. Most importantly, there will be not one winner, but two, and we all know how important winning is.

Me first: When the parking shuttle driver at LAX politely explained that he was full and that another bus would be along soon, the next guy in line pounded on the door so furiously that it shattered, after which the customer decided that maybe he didn’t need to take that shuttle and melted back into the terminal.

Should we that YOU were that next guy in line? :eek: Or does this one fall within that new category?

When my phone started ringing from inside my shirt during secondary screening.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=372755

Out of all the thousands of miles I've earned, I think I've only booked one or two award trips for me. I haven't used them for upgrades, just on award trips for others.

In April I took my girlfriend, her son, and her grandson with me to Hawaii. I paid for my DL trip, and used 60K miles per person for each of them to go. Her son's friend went with us on DL, also, for a total of 5 people.

We left the Friday before Good Friday, and we were all hoping for a bump. We got to the gate in ATL, they only needed 4 of us, so Susie went to Hawaii and the rest of us were booked on another flight 75 minutes later. This one was also oversold, so we knew we would be in ATL overnight, DL gave us hotel rooms. All set!

This was right around lunch time, so I took the gang into the A Crown Room. I wanted to go online, check seat assignments, check for bump chances, etc. Susie's 8-year old grandson was perfect, he just played with some stuff he brought. Her son and his friend took liberal advantage of the free drinks in the Crown Room. They were getting louder and louder, and talking about the rich b*****ds, and I wanted to just disappear. Then when Jeff dropped his drink on the table and it shattered, I knew it was time to disappear for real!

Then when we waited for our shuttle to the hotel, Jeff started hitting on another lady waiting for the shuttle to go to the same hotel. He kept getting closer to her and touched her innocently on the arm, and she wanted to run as far away from him as she could. I tried to tell him to knock it off, but he's about twice as big as I am, and he was in his own world.

Then his sister, bro-in-law and baby joined us at the hotel for dinner. He wanted to play with the baby but he was still drunk and just scared the baby. I had to apologize to the family for getting him drunk. Later that night he knocked on my room door, I knew it was him, I just pretended it was the cops, and I said "I'm not going to bail him out of jail!"

Next morning he apologized, we went to airport, had another chance to get bumped for $600 per person but would be stuck in ATL another night. The guys said later they considered taking the bump, but all I could envision was a rerun of the day before or possibly worse!

It was months before I dared show my face in the same Crown Room, but they didn't remember me or my company, because they let me in.

I’ll just let you guess as it couldn't hurt my rep by people thinking that I periodically go ballistic and destroy buses.

In 1965, after being in Italy for only 2 months, I was certain that I was completely fluent in the language.

I was in a train compartment with about 5 other people with a rather cool breeze coming in from an open window. I noticed that a nun sitting near it appeared a bit uncomfortable, but thought I should check with her before taking it upon myself to close it.

When I asked her if she was cold, I unfortunately translated directly from English and got some very strange looks from the other passengers.

The actual meaning of my question was, "Excuse me, Sister, but are you frigid?"

Or waitresses carrying a full tray of martinis as the case may be.

My latest humiliation is one of old age perhaps. For the first time in history (over 1000 flight segments I estimate) I actually missed a flight due to my own error. For some reason I had it stuck in my head that the AF LYS-LHR flight leaves at 20:00 or 8pm. It actually leaves at 18:00 or 6pm. Even when I checked on the web earlier that day for the flight status and it said 18:00 departure, I still somehow had it in my mind that it was 8pm.

So I showed up at LYS at around 7pm and didn't see any flights to LHR on the board. I went to the AF ticket desk and asked where my flight was, still insisting that I was booked on an 8pm to LHR. They said there is no flight so I whipped out my laptop and opened up my confirmation email and sure enough, I'm an idiot.

I ended up paying €200 for a room at the Sofitel inside LYS and taking the 7am flight the next day. True humiliation and a bit costly too. The only saving grace was that I had a nice French dinner that night rather than eating English food. ;)

Rewind to 1994, when I was ten years less experienced at this game, but still should have known a lot better:

Finishing up a long weekend vacation in Florence, I was due to fly to London to go back to work. I looked at my ticket, read the 9:10 AM flight time, and realized glumly that I had to get up really, really early to get a taxi to the bus station and then the bus to the Florence-Pisa airport, about an hour away. I set my alarm for 5 AM and dragged myself out of bed the next morning. Looked in the mirror and noticed in horror that I had gotten some kind of insect or spider bite during the night that caused a huge bump on my forehead, like a golf ball. (Think of Matthew Broderick in "Election," with the bee sting.) Anyway, I still had to get to the airport, so I got my cab and got on the bus. When I reached the airport, I saw an amazing number of policemen standing around with machine guns and dogs, and someone told me that the president of Italy was expected to fly there that day. OK.

I went over to look at the monitors to check if my flight was on time--and began to panic as I didn't find it on the monitor at all! In terror, I went up to the counter and asked about the flight, only to have the agent point out to me that my flight NUMBER was 910, whereas my flight TIME was 16:45. (At least it wasn't the other way around. That's the only good thing I can say about that day.)

Thus I found myself sitting in Florence-Pisa airport, which was about the size of a mid-size city's bus station in the US, for the next nine hours. With not even a restaurant, just a snack bar where I drove the counter guy insane by asking repeatedly for ice cubes to put against the huge bump on my head. With Italian secret service agents and policemen watching me continually, wondering what this loon with scruffy clothes, an overstuffed daypack, and a huge bump on her head was doing sitting on the floor of the airport for nine hours on a day when the President was due to fly through.

Oy.

Doesn't this just sum it up perfectly? :)

LOL, yes! :D

Several months ago, I was on my usual red-eye flight from HNL to SFO on a domestic 767-300. On boarding I noticed a group of about 8 Chinese men and women who seemed to be traveling as a small tour group.

When I arrived in my first class aisle seat, the man in the window seat asked me to change seats with his friend who had a window seat on the other side of the plane. I just don't like window seats especially after a past bad incident being "trapped" in a window seat next to a man who found it extremely inconvenient to let me out to go to the restroom twice in 5 hours.

I politely declined and he started ranting loudly in chinese to a lady behind us about how uncooperative I was being. She was pressing him to keep asking me to move. Of course, they didn't realize that no matter how non-Chinese I look, I do understand the language. I figured I'd let them go at it and then give them some choice words at the end of the flight. Of course, the man kept asking me to switch seats and I kept declining. Grrr...

Finally, a man stops beside my seat. He looks confused as he proceeds to tell me that he is in the window seat next to me. I turn to the annoying man next to me and he pulls out his boarding pass. It turns out that he was in the WRONG SEAT! He was actually in the seat across the aisle from me. He doesn't even apologize and just leaves the seat.

Oh but it gets better...he takes his carry-on bag and tries to stuff it over his new seat. I comment to him that he should use one of the side bins since the middle bins are smaller. He ignores me and continues to smash his bag into his overhead bin and finally succeeds in getting it in. He turns to give me a smug look. I just think to myself that what goes around, comes around. It certainly comes faster than I realized when on landing, he's wedged his bag so well into the bin that he can't get it out! No matter what he tries, it is stuck and not coming out. The last I saw of him, he was standing on the seats pulling on his bag and all the other passengers were streaming past him giving him strange looks. I had to use all my will power not to say, "Told you so" in chinese as I left.

TF :cool: