January 3-January 4, 2007
Jeremy Tang and Joel Santana
And so it begins
Airports are funny places. As all of you know, the recent airport scares tracing back to the events of 9/11 have caused airport security to become drastically more stringent when it comes to security. For those who travel internationally, you know that you should arrive at the airport a good three to four hours before the flight is meant to leave, because checking baggage into the airport is one of the biggest airport pains. So naturally, these are the annoyance I expected to greet me at the airport on my ride to JFK – too bad life is rarely that simple.
We have all been waiting for this event the entire semester and the day had finally arrived for us to leave for our DIS in Buenos Aires. On January 3rd, 22 of us (professors included) headed to JFK International Airport, and we planned to meet past the security checkpoint at 7:00 PM. The flight itself would leave at 10 PM that night, we would sleep on the plane finally wake up refreshed in Buenos Aires at 10 AM Buenos Aires time (for those who don’t know BA is 2 hours head of EST, so it was a 10 hour flight). Our buddy, Murphy’s Law, decided to have other plans for us.
For those who don’t know the concept of Murphy’s Law or just want to be reminded of what it is, it’s the concept and idea that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Now I’m not a pessimist or even believe that Murphy’s Law can be applied to everything in our lives, but we all got a fun dose of its treatment on the 3rd day of the new year whether we wanted it or not.
After a small personal debacle, I arrive at the airport at 7:03, which is not terrible considering that I was not the last one to arrive at the airport and Sandra (our professor) was stuck in New York traffic. As I was waiting in line, I noticed some familiar faces and started to observe why I was moving one space perhaps ever 10 minutes. American Airlines was heavily understaffed (there apparently was also a downstairs check in that some of us were at but were scooted upstairs to the other painfully slow line), and for some reason no one had the urge to open up another check in counter or two. I wasn’t going to let Murphy ruin what I’ve been waiting for the entire semester, so I just dealt with the slow line. About 30 minutes of waiting, I get a nice phone call from Chelsea, who had been near the front of the line, and the transcript of the conversation went something like this:
Chelsea: Hey guess what?
Jeremy: Hey, I don’t know, what?
Chelsea: Well our plane is delayed until tomorrow morning…8:30 AM.
Jeremy: This is a joke right?
Chelsea: Nope no joke, I’m being serious.
Jeremy: If this is a joke, this is a really bad one, like the one where I will kill someone bad.
Chelsea: Well we [Chelsea, Lisa, and Joel] are calling people and telling them. Check your bags in though just so you don’t have to go through with it tomorrow. Bye
Murphy 1, us 0
I turn to Cristal, who was a good line behind me.
Jeremy: So uh, Cristal…our plane is delayed…
Cristal: Oh no…until what time?
Jeremy: Until 8.
Cristal: But that’s in an hour and our flight leaves at 10 I thought.
Jeremy: I know. I meant 8 AM.
Cristal: WHAT!?!?!?!
Guy Behind her in line with Spanish Accent: Excuse me, what’s been delayed?
Jeremy: The flight to Buenos Aires.
Guy: But I just checked the flights before I got here.
Jeremy: Well, I’m not sure if my friends are joking…
Guy: This is not a very good joke.
Jeremy: I know.
Guy leaves and comes back about 2 minutes later: You are right…this is ridiculous.
Nothing spreads faster than bad news. Within minutes, the word had spread that the plane had been delayed and needless to say there were a lot of mad people. A man at the front was arguing with the check in counter and you could hear snip bits of the conversation that included:
Man: UNBELIEVABLE!
Check in Lady: Sir, calm down, I’m doing the best I can…
Man: WELL AMERICAN AIRLINES SUCKS! CAN´T YOU WORK ANY FASTER!
Lady: I will not take that tone and attitude from you sir!
Man: I WANT TO SPEAK TO YOUR SUPERVISOR!
Lady: If you talk like this, I’m sure he won’t want to see you!
Man: I WON’T FLY AMERICAN AIRLINES AGAIN!
Lady: That’s fine, you can take your business elsewhere. I don’t think we’d mind losing a customer like you!
Man: HOW SLOW ARE YOU WORKING!
Lady: If you yell at me anymore I will work slower!
Man: WELL YOU’RE DOING A GOOD JOB!
Now the man’s wife was trying to calm him down but of course he’s a guy and he would never give into a situation like this. He’s the customer and he’s always right in these situations. Gotta love America. So on top of this, we’re down one more check in person on the already painful line.
Murphy 2, us 0.
So I let Cristal cut me and after a bit of time we finally get to the front and make our way to the teller only to have her walk out on us because she was being summoned to work at the check in counter across the way at the other American Airlines desk.
Murphy 3, us 0.
We finally check in our bags and the check in lady was extremely nice and helpful to us. She even reminds us that we need our pj’s and toothbrush from our luggage bag which we take out (I think I need to point out that Cristal has 2 luggage bags: one for shoes and the other for her clothes and she needs to sit on her luggage to close it). She gave us our food vouchers and told us to wait by a group of people to get our hotel vouchers.
Murphy 3, us 1. Ha, what now! Murphy doesn’t like it when we have some spark of hope…he makes us pay.
We get yelled at for pressuring the guy who’s giving out the vouchers, which is slower and more painful than waiting for check in. (In his defense, he also had to deal with the man from above and a good handful of irate customers who wanted to place him on a stake and burn him without a moments notice.) Cristal and I decide to run and meet the rest of the group because they said we didn’t need the hotel vouchers and were waiting for us (they are in terminal 8, we were in terminal 9 so it was a walk.)
What the heck, I’ll give Murphy a point here for deception so Murphy 4, us 1.
We were the last ones to join our group (we were greeted by sarcastic applause but I understand) and we went to the food court. (I learned that Josh and Gabby decided to go to Josh’s home in NYC and rest for the night there; the rest of us are not as fortunate and must rough it out in the airport.) So the food court was about to close anyways which means that there is barely any food available. We pick what we want (there were debacles about food vouchers, but it was all sorted out in the end. Apparently the food court doesn’t like vouchers too much and will do anything in its path to ensure that we get as little benefits as possible from our vouchers), and after we were finished, we went back to terminal 9 to get to our hotel. Now we had to travel on the monorail system over one stop to get to hotel shuttles (called the Jamaican Rail). Sandra decided to call the hotels (we couldn’t find the shuttles at first), and honestly we were growing impatient and were willing to sleep at the airport. Luckily Sandra called the hotel because American Airlines had overbooked the hotel and there were no more rooms available.
Murphy 5, us 1.
Now another hotel made a deal with us: If we go back to the check in counter and get new vouchers, we can squeeze into their hotel. (It’s around 11 or 12 at this point for those of you are interested.) Good deal right? We get back onto the Jamaican Rail system. Now you think one stop over and we’re there right? Yeah you guessed it.
Murphy 6, us 1.
If you don’t know JFK really well, I’ll summarize its layout. It’s a huge international airport with 9 terminals all looped around a center. Now this creates a circle for those who have trouble envisioning this, and the Jamaican Rail system also moves in a circle…but in a one way direction. So we have to go through about 7 or 8 stops before we finally reach the terminal (terminal 8 and 9 share a station), walk back to terminal 8 and finally make it back to the ticket counter. We get our new vouchers and American Airlines tells us that there will be a shuttle to pick us up right at the entrance closest to us in 10 minutes.
Murphy 6, us 2. You remember what I said about Murphy being a sore winner?
We wait outside, and it’s kind of chilly out, around 50 degrees or slightly higher (really warm for us around this time of the year). We talk and some of us move inside to where it’s warm. We talk some more, laugh about how this will be a fun little memory to tell our friends later, and see the same limousine pass by us about 10 times…. Wait a sec… We check our watches and it is almost 1 AM in the morning.
Murphy 7, us 2.
During this time, Sandra has been going back to the ticket counter and asking what’s going on and the lady assured her that the shuttle was coming. Boy, were we gullible. Sandra called the Ramada Inn (our false savior) and it turns out that they have no idea what we’re talking about when we said that a shuttle was supposed to come pick us up. Their reasoning: they had no more rooms in their hotel, so why would they bother sending a shuttle? Logical, yes. Were we happy…of course not. From that point on a few things happened pretty quickly and they happened like this in particular order.
Sandra was yelling at the check in lady and her supervisor to find us hotels to sleep in (there were hotels available, and they would take our vouchers with an extra $200 on top of it, like the Marriot, but we’re college students and money is something we like to keep), and we were not allowed to sleep in the airport (again we’re college students, we’d sleep anywhere but they just wouldn’t let us). Now we were not the only victims of this fiscal. There was an elderly couple who was suffering every moment with us and was just as mad as we were. Have you ever been to NYC and seen one of those crazy guys on the corner warning you that the world will end any time soon? Well the wife of the couple decided to jump on top of the counter and make a show as she displayed her anger her audience: the 20 of us, the check in lady and her supervisor, and various arcade machines strewed along the terminal. Afterwards, she came to us and preach to us and here is some things she said.
Lady: AMERICAN AIRLINES LIES TO YOU! THERE IS NO SHUTTLE COMING! THEY WANT TO JUST SHUT US UP SO WE WON’T CREATE A SCENE!
Us (at least in our heads): Yeah we know…leave us alone…we’re tired
Lady: AMERICAN AIRLINES IS A BAD COMPANY!! I’M GOING TO SUE THEM!
Now what makes matters interesting is that the check in lady decided to call the cops and they strolled on by to see what was going on. The lady decided to inform them about our situation.
Lady: AMERICAN AIRELINES IS HORRIBLE!
Police: I can’t do anything about it. They’re not breaking the law, but you can write a complaint about it.
Lady: I HATE AMERICAN AIRLINES!
Police: Madam, if you don't calm down and stop jumping on counters, I'm going to have to arrest you. You can complain on this side of the counter.
Husband of Lady: Well at least there are beds in jail...
Nothing terribly interesting transpired, but Maria decided to throw in her two cents into conversation (in her defense she tried to make the situation clear), and eventually it became an argument between people and the cops were not too happy with us. We finally manage to get some rooms at the Ramada Inn somehow, just to show their good will, they send a shuttle, which actually came.
Murphy 7, us 3. Yes we got a spark of hope again!
Unfortunately there was only room for about 8 of us, we some of us volunteered to go stay behind and let the others go (I’d like to spend this moment to note that every guy and I mean all 8 of us volunteered to stay behind despite our disgruntled attitudes, and 8 girls happily ran to the shuttle.) As we were waiting for the shuttle to return, we find out some more news. There were no more rooms at the Ramada and we needed to find another hotel.
Murphy 8, us 3.
After some talking, the Fairfield Inn finally agreed to take us and the rest of us hopped into the shuttle when it arrived. Now it was the rest of us and then there was a poor woman in the corner (I’m pretty sure she worked for the inn and just was there to make sure the driver didn’t get hurt on the way back or something). We finally get our rooms and at 2:30 AM. We probably went to sleep within 15 minutes of that and all was well. We got a wonderful wake up call at 6:00 AM, meaning we got about 3 hours of sleep and trudged on over to the lobby, where we proceeded to raid all of the breakfast foods we could (hey they were free, we’re college kids, you get the picture), and get onto the shuttle to JFK.
Murphy 9 for the 3 hours of sleep, us 3.
We get to the airport and smile as we don’t have to check in our bags. We march on over to the security check point at terminal 8 and get through without much trouble. Now you would think we were out of the woods. The gate is right there, the plane was going to leave in less than an hour. Nah, that would be too nice. Maria ended up getting caught up in security and Sandra asked a guard who told us we were in the wrong terminal. Sandra decided to wait for Maria as the rest of us marched on out of the terminal and made our way back to terminal 9. Harmony gets a call from Josh and asks where we are. Harmony said that our flight is at terminal 9, Josh begged to differ. Apparently he was in terminal 8, at the gate, and they were boarding.
Murphy 10, us 3.
We had to go through security again and managed to get through quicker than we thought, and found the rest of our group. We managed to get onto the airplane, and 10 hours later, we were in Buenos Aires, starving and tired. We managed to survive the taxi ride to the hotel and before we knew we were finally checked in. Despite our fatigue of traveling, our stomachs demanded food, so we traveled to the corner and ate at the Plaza Café where most of us tried our first Argentine beer (meal and drinks courtesy of Sandra). We finally settled in after our long day and wished for the best (see I told you I wasn’t a pessimist.) Maybe some of the other blogs will show whether or not Murphy followed us around.
And so it begins
Airports are funny places. As all of you know, the recent airport scares tracing back to the events of 9/11 have caused airport security to become drastically more stringent when it comes to security. For those who travel internationally, you know that you should arrive at the airport a good three to four hours before the flight is meant to leave, because checking baggage into the airport is one of the biggest airport pains. So naturally, these are the annoyance I expected to greet me at the airport on my ride to JFK – too bad life is rarely that simple.
We have all been waiting for this event the entire semester and the day had finally arrived for us to leave for our DIS in Buenos Aires. On January 3rd, 22 of us (professors included) headed to JFK International Airport, and we planned to meet past the security checkpoint at 7:00 PM. The flight itself would leave at 10 PM that night, we would sleep on the plane finally wake up refreshed in Buenos Aires at 10 AM Buenos Aires time (for those who don’t know BA is 2 hours head of EST, so it was a 10 hour flight). Our buddy, Murphy’s Law, decided to have other plans for us.
For those who don’t know the concept of Murphy’s Law or just want to be reminded of what it is, it’s the concept and idea that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Now I’m not a pessimist or even believe that Murphy’s Law can be applied to everything in our lives, but we all got a fun dose of its treatment on the 3rd day of the new year whether we wanted it or not.
After a small personal debacle, I arrive at the airport at 7:03, which is not terrible considering that I was not the last one to arrive at the airport and Sandra (our professor) was stuck in New York traffic. As I was waiting in line, I noticed some familiar faces and started to observe why I was moving one space perhaps ever 10 minutes. American Airlines was heavily understaffed (there apparently was also a downstairs check in that some of us were at but were scooted upstairs to the other painfully slow line), and for some reason no one had the urge to open up another check in counter or two. I wasn’t going to let Murphy ruin what I’ve been waiting for the entire semester, so I just dealt with the slow line. About 30 minutes of waiting, I get a nice phone call from Chelsea, who had been near the front of the line, and the transcript of the conversation went something like this:
Chelsea: Hey guess what?
Jeremy: Hey, I don’t know, what?
Chelsea: Well our plane is delayed until tomorrow morning…8:30 AM.
Jeremy: This is a joke right?
Chelsea: Nope no joke, I’m being serious.
Jeremy: If this is a joke, this is a really bad one, like the one where I will kill someone bad.
Chelsea: Well we [Chelsea, Lisa, and Joel] are calling people and telling them. Check your bags in though just so you don’t have to go through with it tomorrow. Bye
Murphy 1, us 0
I turn to Cristal, who was a good line behind me.
Jeremy: So uh, Cristal…our plane is delayed…
Cristal: Oh no…until what time?
Jeremy: Until 8.
Cristal: But that’s in an hour and our flight leaves at 10 I thought.
Jeremy: I know. I meant 8 AM.
Cristal: WHAT!?!?!?!
Guy Behind her in line with Spanish Accent: Excuse me, what’s been delayed?
Jeremy: The flight to Buenos Aires.
Guy: But I just checked the flights before I got here.
Jeremy: Well, I’m not sure if my friends are joking…
Guy: This is not a very good joke.
Jeremy: I know.
Guy leaves and comes back about 2 minutes later: You are right…this is ridiculous.
Nothing spreads faster than bad news. Within minutes, the word had spread that the plane had been delayed and needless to say there were a lot of mad people. A man at the front was arguing with the check in counter and you could hear snip bits of the conversation that included:
Man: UNBELIEVABLE!
Check in Lady: Sir, calm down, I’m doing the best I can…
Man: WELL AMERICAN AIRLINES SUCKS! CAN´T YOU WORK ANY FASTER!
Lady: I will not take that tone and attitude from you sir!
Man: I WANT TO SPEAK TO YOUR SUPERVISOR!
Lady: If you talk like this, I’m sure he won’t want to see you!
Man: I WON’T FLY AMERICAN AIRLINES AGAIN!
Lady: That’s fine, you can take your business elsewhere. I don’t think we’d mind losing a customer like you!
Man: HOW SLOW ARE YOU WORKING!
Lady: If you yell at me anymore I will work slower!
Man: WELL YOU’RE DOING A GOOD JOB!
Now the man’s wife was trying to calm him down but of course he’s a guy and he would never give into a situation like this. He’s the customer and he’s always right in these situations. Gotta love America. So on top of this, we’re down one more check in person on the already painful line.
Murphy 2, us 0.
So I let Cristal cut me and after a bit of time we finally get to the front and make our way to the teller only to have her walk out on us because she was being summoned to work at the check in counter across the way at the other American Airlines desk.
Murphy 3, us 0.
We finally check in our bags and the check in lady was extremely nice and helpful to us. She even reminds us that we need our pj’s and toothbrush from our luggage bag which we take out (I think I need to point out that Cristal has 2 luggage bags: one for shoes and the other for her clothes and she needs to sit on her luggage to close it). She gave us our food vouchers and told us to wait by a group of people to get our hotel vouchers.
Murphy 3, us 1. Ha, what now! Murphy doesn’t like it when we have some spark of hope…he makes us pay.
We get yelled at for pressuring the guy who’s giving out the vouchers, which is slower and more painful than waiting for check in. (In his defense, he also had to deal with the man from above and a good handful of irate customers who wanted to place him on a stake and burn him without a moments notice.) Cristal and I decide to run and meet the rest of the group because they said we didn’t need the hotel vouchers and were waiting for us (they are in terminal 8, we were in terminal 9 so it was a walk.)
What the heck, I’ll give Murphy a point here for deception so Murphy 4, us 1.
We were the last ones to join our group (we were greeted by sarcastic applause but I understand) and we went to the food court. (I learned that Josh and Gabby decided to go to Josh’s home in NYC and rest for the night there; the rest of us are not as fortunate and must rough it out in the airport.) So the food court was about to close anyways which means that there is barely any food available. We pick what we want (there were debacles about food vouchers, but it was all sorted out in the end. Apparently the food court doesn’t like vouchers too much and will do anything in its path to ensure that we get as little benefits as possible from our vouchers), and after we were finished, we went back to terminal 9 to get to our hotel. Now we had to travel on the monorail system over one stop to get to hotel shuttles (called the Jamaican Rail). Sandra decided to call the hotels (we couldn’t find the shuttles at first), and honestly we were growing impatient and were willing to sleep at the airport. Luckily Sandra called the hotel because American Airlines had overbooked the hotel and there were no more rooms available.
Murphy 5, us 1.
Now another hotel made a deal with us: If we go back to the check in counter and get new vouchers, we can squeeze into their hotel. (It’s around 11 or 12 at this point for those of you are interested.) Good deal right? We get back onto the Jamaican Rail system. Now you think one stop over and we’re there right? Yeah you guessed it.
Murphy 6, us 1.
If you don’t know JFK really well, I’ll summarize its layout. It’s a huge international airport with 9 terminals all looped around a center. Now this creates a circle for those who have trouble envisioning this, and the Jamaican Rail system also moves in a circle…but in a one way direction. So we have to go through about 7 or 8 stops before we finally reach the terminal (terminal 8 and 9 share a station), walk back to terminal 8 and finally make it back to the ticket counter. We get our new vouchers and American Airlines tells us that there will be a shuttle to pick us up right at the entrance closest to us in 10 minutes.
Murphy 6, us 2. You remember what I said about Murphy being a sore winner?
We wait outside, and it’s kind of chilly out, around 50 degrees or slightly higher (really warm for us around this time of the year). We talk and some of us move inside to where it’s warm. We talk some more, laugh about how this will be a fun little memory to tell our friends later, and see the same limousine pass by us about 10 times…. Wait a sec… We check our watches and it is almost 1 AM in the morning.
Murphy 7, us 2.
During this time, Sandra has been going back to the ticket counter and asking what’s going on and the lady assured her that the shuttle was coming. Boy, were we gullible. Sandra called the Ramada Inn (our false savior) and it turns out that they have no idea what we’re talking about when we said that a shuttle was supposed to come pick us up. Their reasoning: they had no more rooms in their hotel, so why would they bother sending a shuttle? Logical, yes. Were we happy…of course not. From that point on a few things happened pretty quickly and they happened like this in particular order.
Sandra was yelling at the check in lady and her supervisor to find us hotels to sleep in (there were hotels available, and they would take our vouchers with an extra $200 on top of it, like the Marriot, but we’re college students and money is something we like to keep), and we were not allowed to sleep in the airport (again we’re college students, we’d sleep anywhere but they just wouldn’t let us). Now we were not the only victims of this fiscal. There was an elderly couple who was suffering every moment with us and was just as mad as we were. Have you ever been to NYC and seen one of those crazy guys on the corner warning you that the world will end any time soon? Well the wife of the couple decided to jump on top of the counter and make a show as she displayed her anger her audience: the 20 of us, the check in lady and her supervisor, and various arcade machines strewed along the terminal. Afterwards, she came to us and preach to us and here is some things she said.
Lady: AMERICAN AIRLINES LIES TO YOU! THERE IS NO SHUTTLE COMING! THEY WANT TO JUST SHUT US UP SO WE WON’T CREATE A SCENE!
Us (at least in our heads): Yeah we know…leave us alone…we’re tired
Lady: AMERICAN AIRLINES IS A BAD COMPANY!! I’M GOING TO SUE THEM!
Now what makes matters interesting is that the check in lady decided to call the cops and they strolled on by to see what was going on. The lady decided to inform them about our situation.
Lady: AMERICAN AIRELINES IS HORRIBLE!
Police: I can’t do anything about it. They’re not breaking the law, but you can write a complaint about it.
Lady: I HATE AMERICAN AIRLINES!
Police: Madam, if you don't calm down and stop jumping on counters, I'm going to have to arrest you. You can complain on this side of the counter.
Husband of Lady: Well at least there are beds in jail...
Nothing terribly interesting transpired, but Maria decided to throw in her two cents into conversation (in her defense she tried to make the situation clear), and eventually it became an argument between people and the cops were not too happy with us. We finally manage to get some rooms at the Ramada Inn somehow, just to show their good will, they send a shuttle, which actually came.
Murphy 7, us 3. Yes we got a spark of hope again!
Unfortunately there was only room for about 8 of us, we some of us volunteered to go stay behind and let the others go (I’d like to spend this moment to note that every guy and I mean all 8 of us volunteered to stay behind despite our disgruntled attitudes, and 8 girls happily ran to the shuttle.) As we were waiting for the shuttle to return, we find out some more news. There were no more rooms at the Ramada and we needed to find another hotel.
Murphy 8, us 3.
After some talking, the Fairfield Inn finally agreed to take us and the rest of us hopped into the shuttle when it arrived. Now it was the rest of us and then there was a poor woman in the corner (I’m pretty sure she worked for the inn and just was there to make sure the driver didn’t get hurt on the way back or something). We finally get our rooms and at 2:30 AM. We probably went to sleep within 15 minutes of that and all was well. We got a wonderful wake up call at 6:00 AM, meaning we got about 3 hours of sleep and trudged on over to the lobby, where we proceeded to raid all of the breakfast foods we could (hey they were free, we’re college kids, you get the picture), and get onto the shuttle to JFK.
Murphy 9 for the 3 hours of sleep, us 3.
We get to the airport and smile as we don’t have to check in our bags. We march on over to the security check point at terminal 8 and get through without much trouble. Now you would think we were out of the woods. The gate is right there, the plane was going to leave in less than an hour. Nah, that would be too nice. Maria ended up getting caught up in security and Sandra asked a guard who told us we were in the wrong terminal. Sandra decided to wait for Maria as the rest of us marched on out of the terminal and made our way back to terminal 9. Harmony gets a call from Josh and asks where we are. Harmony said that our flight is at terminal 9, Josh begged to differ. Apparently he was in terminal 8, at the gate, and they were boarding.
Murphy 10, us 3.
We had to go through security again and managed to get through quicker than we thought, and found the rest of our group. We managed to get onto the airplane, and 10 hours later, we were in Buenos Aires, starving and tired. We managed to survive the taxi ride to the hotel and before we knew we were finally checked in. Despite our fatigue of traveling, our stomachs demanded food, so we traveled to the corner and ate at the Plaza Café where most of us tried our first Argentine beer (meal and drinks courtesy of Sandra). We finally settled in after our long day and wished for the best (see I told you I wasn’t a pessimist.) Maybe some of the other blogs will show whether or not Murphy followed us around.
posted by Sandra Jamieson @ 4:47 PM
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