Hot Take Tuesday: Curse you American Airlines!

Hot Take Tuesday: The Incoherent Rantings of a Belligerent Bears fan.

The Chicago Bears won on the road on Thanksgiving on a ridiculously short week against a division rival with their backup quarterback. If you want any more evidence that this team is legit, there it is right there.

The Bears have put themselves in great shape to win the division which would most likely earn them the 3-seed in the playoffs. Things are coming up rosy for the Bears right now, but things didn’t come up rosy for me this weekend thanks to our incompetent friends at American Airlines.

Excuse me while I go on a complete tangent. Why is Hot Take Tuesday on a Thursday? I’ll tell you why.

For those who don’t know, I live in New York now, I’m from Chicago originally and my family is still there, so I made the trip to the Chicago area for Thanksgiving.

I had a glorious few days with family and all went well. Saturday, we get word about the pending blizzard coming Sunday night. I was on the 5:30pm flight on Sunday, we checked to see if we could get that flight bumped up a couple of hours but there wasn’t availability on those other flights. They weren’t predicting heavy snow until two or three hours after our departure, so we weren’t too worried.

So we drive to O’Hare and drop off our rental car. As we were checking in at the kiosk, my phone rings and our flight has been cancelled. Not a spec of snow in sight at this point. We find out that our flight was cancelled because despite perfectly good weather all day, American fell behind in their departures, so our flight was going to be delayed an hour or two and into the blizzard so they had to cancel it. Nice.

American cancelled all four remaining flights to NYC that day, so there was a boatload of people needing to be rescheduled which made for quite the adventure getting re-booked.

We sit in line for a solid 45 minutes and they are able to book us (my girl and me) on the 8:30pm flight on Monday. Not ideal as it causes both of us to miss a day of work, but we’ll live. So we had back to the car rental facility, rent another car and head back to my family’s place.

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My Monday kicked off with shoveling snow, so that’s a hoot, but had a chance to relax a little bit more with family before heading to the airport. Arrived at the airport at 6:30, dropped off rental car #2 and went through security and headed to our gate.

Text alert: Your flight now departs at 8:50.

Okay, fine. Five minutes later:

Text alert: Your flight now departs at 9:20.

Ugh. Ten minutes later:

Text alert: Your flight now departs at 10:00.

Wonderful.

We have some dinner and sit down at the gate. By the time we return to the gate after our dinner, our flight is now departing at 10:30.

Have I mentioned the weather is crystal clear? There snow stopped 14 hours ago, and the city of Chicago may have faults, but they are champions when it comes to clearing snow.

Now the gate agent gets on the horn and says they can’t find flight attendants. Then they found flight attendants but the pilot timed out and isn’t allowed to fly the rest of the month. Then they found a new pilot but by then, the flight attendants timed out. Then they found new flight attendants but they couldn’t find a first officer.

Felix was our gate agent, polite he was not. Felix’s quality customer service included using the phrase, “Don’t bust by balls” to one passenger and at one point when he said, “We should begin boarding in 5-10 minutes” a lady asked, “Can you promise that?” And he responded with, “No, do you want to fly the plane yourself?”

While we played musical flight crew, while they were still trying to square away a first officer, the second set of flight attendants timed out and they cancelled our flight at 11:30pm.

What a bunch of incompetent fools! So now, I have to try to re-book my flight again, and guess what, they suggest that I can fly to New York on Wednesday afternoon (causing me to miss three days of work) or I could bounce around the entire country with about 77 layovers and travel for roughly 16 hours on Tuesday.

At this point, American Airlines has lost my business. They had 48 hours to get me home and couldn’t manage it, so here I am at 1am getting in a rental car (the third one in three days) and driving to South Bend, Indiana where we crashed at a hotel and then drove all the way to Long Island, New York (after a quick stop at La Guardia Airport to drop off our rental car and get our own car). Nothing like a 900 mile drive because your airlines can’t complete the task they claim they supposedly do every day.

So after going to bed around 1:30am on Tuesday, my Wednesday was spent trying to get my life and regular job back and order and so, I present to you, Hot Take Tuesday on a Thursday.

Thank you, American Airlines, your incompetence is unmatched.

Anyways, oh right, the Bears are good.

Quick Hits

Chase Daniel proved that he was worth the money to make sure the team has a legitimate backup quarterback.
#BearsSingToAnything is the greatest hashtag on Twitter and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go check it out now.
Nobody makes more impact plays defensively in the NFL than Eddie Jackson. He has 5 TDs in 27 career games. That’s absurd.
James Daniels continues to show that he was an outstanding selection by Ryan Pace and he’s going to be an impressive player.
Roquan Smith is incredible. His play in November was impressive. Can’t wait to continue to watch this kid improve.
Kyle Fuller is playing at an All-Pro level. So is Khalil Mack. So is Eddie Jackson. Not Pro Bowl level. All-Pro.
Sitting Mitch Trubisky against the NY Giants is the right move, don’t overthink it. Keep the big picture in perspective.

Hot Take Tuesday: The Incoherent Rantings of a Belligerent Bears fan.

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