(Saturday, June 29, 2013) Because of storms along the eastern seaboard, Bonnie and I arrived at Detroit International from Norfolk (and the dream conference) six hours too late for our connecting flight to Minneapolis, at around two in the morning. We had re-booked before we left Norfolk and were scheduled for an 8:30 flight home from Detroit.
Immediately after deplaning, the Delta gate attendant printed off a new ticket that sent me to Reagan Airport in D.C. at noon that day, with just 15 minutes to make my connector back to Minneapolis. The computer had bumped me, but not Bonnie, from the 8:30 flight. I went to another gate for help but the woman there told me all the direct flights back to MSP were “zeroed out.”
I joined the Help queue with a group of young female basketball players and their parents who had been on our Norfolk flight and were desperately trying to get all 18 of them back home to Minneapolis. I think I stood in line at least two hours while Bonnie tried to sleep curled up on the hard floor. The mood all around was of intense frustration, fatigue and disbelief. I had been pretty irritable with one of the Delta employees and was not feeling good about my behavior, so I decided to try to exercise real calm in the middle of chaos, in the middle of the long, crawling line. I focused on keeping my spine supple and my breathing deep. I treated it like a walking meditation and tried to release any expectation of outcome.
When I was finally next in line for assistance, I heard a voice deep with authority ask: “Ma’am, do you need help?” To my right, about 15 feet away, stood a distinguished black gentleman with very erect posture and a small leather attaché case held loosely in his left hand. “Ma’am, do you need help?” he repeated, and then said. “Come with me.”
I followed him around the corner to a computer terminal. He turned out to be the Delta supervisor. He booted up the computer and told me that prior to talking to me he had checked the Minneapolis flights again and had found one, only one, direct flight, departing at 1:30 in the afternoon. He had secured it for me.
This just all felt like a dream! I told him twice that he was my guardian angel. We spent about fifteen minutes together looking through the computer. He said he had forgotten more information than most Delta employees know. Finally, he showed me the schedule of all the direct flights to Minneapolis and got me on the stand-by list for a 7:30 flight. He told me if I missed that flight to get on stand-by for the next flight, and then the next, and then the next. If all else failed, I had the boarding pass for the 1:30 flight.
Even though there were 22 of us on stand-by for that 7:30 flight, including half of the basketball team and a young med student trying to get home from Prague, we all made it on the plane, landing safely in Minneapolis while Bonnie was still in the air.
Day notes:
This experience is a pretty literal version of my dream “Abilene TX.”