QuakeCon 2025 Part 1: Being Tortured

This post is gonna be mostly a rant. You’ve been warned. Because of that, I’ll save the proper intro for Part 2.

Last year our flight down to Dallas was only delayed by a few hours because of the Crowdstrike fiasco. Well this year it was worse … a LOT worse. Getting to the airport went fine, ticket pickup and baggage check went fine, going through security went fine, our plane was at the gate, but everything after that went almost as far from fine as possible. A faulty module in the plane caused our flight to be delayed indefinitely. Not canceled, mind you, but delayed indefinitely. Remember this detail for the future if I post a follow-up to this catastrophe.

The next big problem was we had three options: cancel our reservations, which at least would have entitled us to a full refund but it would have been a total gamble as to whether we could get three tickets on the same plane to Dallas, re-book on another American Airlines flight and gamble we would get there before QuakeCon, or stick with our existing flight and gamble it wouldn’t get delayed further or canceled entirely. Our initial plan was to see what the flight options were and re-book since I knew already that non-stop flights to Dallas occurred daily from my airport. Another detail to remember for later. While waiting forever in line at the ticket counter we got an update via the AA app that our flight had now been rescheduled to 7AM the next day. Well shit. I’ve encountered delays before but never anything like this, at least not due to extreme weather (for QuakeCon 2017 I almost literally had Hurricane Harvey chase me out of town for my return flight). But if that wasn’t a headache before, what came certainly was: we couldn’t keep our luggage checked with the airport since our flight was now scheduled for the next day and the airport wasn’t open 24 hours. OK, retrieve luggage, book an expensive UberXL, and then head home and wait, right? Wrong. For reasons I still don’t understand, all of the luggage from the plane couldn’t be unloaded onto a carousel and not because they were either in use or any kind of mechanical issue. But airport personel brought each person from the flight into a small office at which point we handed them our boarding passes and then they literally hand delivered each person one. piece. of. luggage. at. a. time. I cannot fathom a more inefficient and painful way of doing this. The flow was a person would go into the office, a baggage handler would take their boarding pass and luggage tags individually, leave the room and then retrieve a single bag. If a flier had multiple bags, like we did, that was a trip per bag. PER. BAG. So five trips and a grand total of four hours later and we now had our two rolling suitcases and three Pelican cases back in hand. We were far from last in line to retrieve our luggage, mind you.

I did confirm with someone at the ticket counter that we were still booked on the flight and that unless the flight was actually listed as canceled we wouldn’t lose our seat reservations. This is also when I found out about the faulty module. I also asked if there was any plan to bring in another plane or change another plane’s flight plan, to which I was told no. Additionally because the flight had already been rescheduled they wouldn’t move the flight up even if another plane became available. So with that handled we booked a $70 UberXL ride back home, which thankfully was uneventful. Upon arriving home I called the hotel in Dallas to inform them that based on current information we would be a day late. Unfortunately because I don’t book hotels with the cancelation refund addons this meant I was still responsible for the first night’s bill. $145 (plus tax and fees) isn’t terrible, but it was still a loss out of my pocket thanks to American Airlines, and I was (still am) unemployed so it’s not like I would recoup that loss.

Once home it was dinner time and we hadn’t eaten anything since morning thanks to the stress of the afternoon, so we whipped up some comfort food and tried to unwind. Before turning in for the night I scheduled an UberXL ride for 4:30AM since I wasn’t sure I would be able to order an XL ride otherwise. I did not sleep that night though as I was constantly checking my phone for more flight delays. Around 2AM that paranoia and anxiety was justified: our flight was now delayed until 9AM. I rescheduled the Uber ride accordingly but I still couldn’t fall asleep. Knowing me sleep deprivation plays a decent part in whether I’ll get sick from a flight due to fatigue impacting my immune system, so I prayed fate would be kind if/when we finally got into the air. We didn’t have any problems getting going in time for our Uber ride at 6:30, but sure enough en route we got another delay notice. 1PM this time, a solid twenty four hours after our originally scheduled departure time. Our driver was very kind and offered to return us back home but we politely declined, opting to wait it out in the airport than risk more delays during another Uber ride.

Once again getting checked in and through security wasn’t an issue, but the delays just kept coming. The only difference is this time we could see technicians actively working on the plane, so at least we knew the replacement parts had arrived.

I wonder if they used the cargo loader to load chicken soup by the barrel to make the plane feel better…

Since we got to the airport in time for a 9AM flight, and we didn’t expect to take off anytime soon, we opted to get food. This is when the next headachemigraine kicked in: American Airlines offered $12 meal vouchers. Anyone that’s flown in the US knows that airport food is marked up obscenely high and $12 will only get you a drink and a pastry at Starbucks. But that wasn’t the worst of it, barely any of the places that sold food accepted the vouchers. I say this to American Airlines: what good is a voucher if it can’t be redeemed? I’m dead serious, answer me that. The one sit-down restaurant in the terminal? Not accepted. The sandwich shop? Nope. The convenience store next to it? Nada. Literally no places in the gate terminal accepted the vouchers, so now we had to trek it back into the connecting terminal where the other restaurants were. Hell we even asked McDonald’s if they took the voucher. 100% SOL. Starbucks was the only remaining option, so too hungry to make a stink about it, I got myself a green tea with lemonade and two of whatever Starbucks was calling a breakfast burrito. My breakfast cost something like $22 and about $15 each for my wife and daughter. So for those keeping track that’s approximately $52 total, only $36 of which was covered by American. Surely things can only get better from here, right? Right?! I swear I remember something from my Probability and Statistics class in college that downwards trends inevitably reverse. Either I was hallucinating or my professor wasn’t teaching the right class.

So what else went wrong? For one, the 1PM takeoff time didn’t happen. You guessed it, delayed again, and again, and again, and … counts on fingers, yep, again. 1PM turned into 5PM, then 7:30PM, then 9PM. The crazy part is the final delay wasn’t even on the schedule, but I’ll get back to that in a minute. The other thing that went wrong was American wasn’t willing to give anyone any more meal vouchers. One voucher per person per day. My family and I had been forced to wait in the terminal since 7AM and American Airlines seemed to think that paying for half of one meal throughout the course of fourteen and a half hours was sufficient compensation. I’m something of a numbers guy and in my literal book shelling out $12 per person per meal ($36 total for three meals, $108 for three people) instead of reimbursing $140 for round-trip ground transporation to home and back, and that’s assuming one round trip, seems like a better option to me. But then again what do I know, I just worked nine years in customer support. Oh let’s not forget that I didn’t sleep the night before, I was cranky inside.

Another thing that really pissed me off is remember earlier when I mentioned my airport had daily flights to Dallas? That flight had the same departure time as us and they didn’t get delayed at all. I get American wanting to minimize the number of pissed off customers, but honestly I feel like we all should have been given that plane and the others forced to use our original plane. Petty? Sure, but like I said, I was sleep deprived and cranky. After seeing their plane take off I opted to order another set of tickets for my family and I for the next day in the event that our flight didn’t take off this day. I also made sure to opt in for guaranteed full refund if we canceled (which we did later that night).

When 9PM rolled around we finally saw some indications of life around the plane outside. The technicians cleared out, moved the rolling stairway back to near the jet bridge, and we heard the plane fire up its engines.

Once more with feeling?

Alas, our hopes weren’t quite realized just yet, but at least they weren’t dashed. The screens still listed a departure time of 9PM but with a delayed status, so I spoke with the attendants at the gate desk to confirm that the intention was for the plane to get in the air that night and they said yes, the faulty module had been replaced, the inspection team signed off on it, and now they were running final pre-flight checks and cleaning the cabin to prepare for boarding. I admittedly know almost nothing about how long commercial pre-flight checks are supposed to take, but I felt like cleaning the cabin for boarding could at least have been done while other things were going on. But again, I was cranky at this point and it had started to really show around dinner time. Being awake for over thirty hours is hard in your late thirties and super stressed.

Finally, at LONG-F*@#ING-LAST we boarded at just after 10PM and hit the runway for a takeoff time of 10:30PM! The full delay was a grand total of 33 hours and 41 minutes. Un-freakin’-believable. We landed just before midnight local time (accounting for an hour time zone difference), just in time to discover the hard way that the free shuttle our hotel from last year uses no longer ran until 1AM, but rather 11PM. Well that’s just great, in addition to losing more than half a night’s stay on top of the first night completely lost we had to spend yet another $60 for, you guessed it, another UberXL ride. This brings us to another grand total: $568.90 which is how much we spent and lost out of pocket due to American Airlines’ failure. That amount breaks down to two nights at our hotel (I’m rounding up from 1.6 nights since we didn’t get checked into our hotel room until nearly 1AM) and the cost of the three extra UberXL rides that we shouldn’t have needed to use. Since I’m writing this after QuakeCon is concluded I can report that as of writing this I’ve gone public with everything. We’ll see how American responds, but I’m expecting to have to put up a fight.

I would also like to mention here that two of my close friends and their SO’s were also flying on American but from different airports. One of them had their flight canceled after being delayed a day forcing them to re-book, the other was delayed from an 8:45AM departure time until around 6PM. None of this was due to weather, it was all electrical or mechanical issues. Y’know if memory serves the airline industry got something like a $2 trillion tax credit recently, and while I don’t know the exact cost of a commercial passenger plane, I imagine American, Delta, and United all getting entirely new fleets of brand new planes would amount to a fraction of that. Hell if you give each airline a thousand planes with them costing $75 million each (which is insanely generous) that’s still just $75 billion per airline, $225 billion total for the three. So just over 10% of the tax credit. As they say in Among Us: very sus…

As shitty as it was that we lost time and more than half a grand out of my pocket, we at least got to Dallas and didn’t miss any of the main event or our return trip to Meow Wolf (yep, back to our favorite twisted reality exhibit). But it would have been nice to have a day to relax after our arrival, and also arrive when food stores were open (nothing is 24-hour anymore post-COVID). But having said all of that, my rant is finally over.

Time to get the big stack of photos ready for the Meow Wolf post. See you in the next one.