sarahmichelef

Late October: car tire slashed
Thanksgiving: car windshield takes a pebble, goes from 0 to 8" crack in >12 hours
Mid-Dec: lateral pipe clog, backup into basement. get told that we need a sump pump. spend lots of time drying out basement carpet.

And then began that which shall hereafter be known as THE WEEK OF SUCK.

Saturday 12/20: in which we attempt to fly from BUF to OKC
Arrive at the airport at 4:30 am for a 6 am flight and discover that the United checkin counter is NOT STAFFED an hour and a half before the first flight out of the day. The line was a good hundred people long already (some of this was spillover from the previous day's weather-related problems). And as usual, the BUF ground crew have the heads in uncomfortable, dark places and nobody knows if they are coming to us for de-icing or if we are going to them. (Did I ever post about how they simply forgot to bring us a plane in August?) Land in ORD an hour and a half late - should be able to make our connection if we run like crazy people. Except then the jet bridge breaks. We sit on the plane for 1h40 while they mess around trying to fix it - the eventually give up and move us to another gate. We had attempted to rebook over the phone while still on the plane, only to discover that phone customer service is only available M-F. We get in line at customer service and the guy who's doing traffic control for the line tells us just to head to the gate of the next OKC flight (which left at noon) and get put on standby. We do that, then go to customer service to get rebooked. The best they can do is get us on a flight to Wichita leaving midday the 21st; if we want to go to Tulsa we can leave in the mid-afternoon on the 21st; if we want to get to OKC we have to wait until the 22nd. Since the ultimate cause of the missed connection was mechanical, they tell us we qualify for hotel & food vouchers. We head to the OKC gate to wait and see if we get on.
We ended up being the first three people who didn't get on the OKC flight. We scampered to the next OK-bound flight, which was going to Tulsa. We got put on the standby list for that and then got BACK in the customer service line to actually attempt to claim our vouchers and to ask about having our luggage sent on ahead to my parents' house, since we were pretty sure it got on the noon OKC flight. Traffic control lady there said they probably couldn't do anything about the luggage, but gave me the number for baggage services. She says "go over to this line here and you can get your vouchers, if there's already a note in the system that you should get them."
So I stood in that line. I stood in that line, un-moving, for an hour and a half (I was in line at customer service for over 2 hours total). During that time, there was a shift change (I think that was at 2 pm but I don't remember for sure). New Line Traffic Control Lady asks me what I want and I tell her that I just want to claim our food & hotel vouchers so we can have some lunch and so we don't have to stand in the line again.

"You can't have food vouchers" she says.
"We're in the system as stranded due to mechanical problems," I say.
"You can only have food vouchers if you check into a hotel," she says.
"Wait a minute," I say. "You mean that if we stay in the airport and attempt to complete our trip, we have to do it on our own dime?"
"Yes."
"But it was YOUR FAULT that we missed our connection. The jetbridge broke."
"Mechanical problems happen, ma'am. You have to plan for it." This was delivered in the most condescending tone you care to imagine.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not too proud to tell you that at that point I went COMPLETELY APESHIT. For the first time in my adult traveling life (and I have traveled quite a bit), I lost my temper at a customer service agent. I screamed at her. I used words that I refrain from using in front of my child. I used LOTS of those words. I declared that United Airlines had lost my business and I stomped off in a huff. I was so angry thaI was shaking. I called M (he and TRex were off somewhere else entertaining themselves while I stood in the line) and screamed a lot as I charged through the terminal. After I simmered down we spent thirty dollars that United should have been covering for two salads, two drinks, and a fruit & yogurt cup from the Chili's stand and I got on the phone with the baggage office. It turned out that they, in fact, could not do anything about our "lost" baggage except tell me that it had, in fact, been on the noon flight to OKC. We could not claim it as lost even though we were quite certain at that point that we would not be landing in OKC.
As it turned out, we were the last three people on the plane to Tulsa. For a couple of minutes, it looked very much like only two of us were going to get on the flight - M would have stayed behind and continued in standby hell, or taken the rebooked flight to Wichita the next day. We took off a bit late (I seem to recall the pilot saying "we're waiting to be de-iced" AFTER I had watched the truck spray us with orange goo) but got there just fine. We filled out the necessary paperwork to get the bag-claiming action going and headed to Stillwater. TRex, who had been up since 3:30 am eastern time and hadn't napped at all (and who was a perfect saint through the whole ordeal, I have to say), passed out in the car basically instantaneously.

Sunday, 12/21: In which we attempted to get our bags.
We couldn't get through, and couldn't get through, and when we finally did, we learned that the bags would be delivered sometime between 10 am and midnight. Yeah, thanks, that's real helpful. When they did call at about 7 pm to let us know they were coming, the driver had never been to Stillwater and did not even have a map. My folks gave him directions and told him they'd let him look at a map when he got to our house. Seriously, people. Shell out for a GPS for your baggage delivery couriers, eh?

Monday 12/22 - Friday 12/26: A family visit, with all that entails.
It was my folks, my sister, our grandmother, M, and the kid with all of the ... entertaining group dynamics that that entails. Monday night we had a holiday party and I saw oodles of people (piano teachers, pediatricians, family friends, some childhood friends); Christmas Eve night some of my HS friends came over to hang out. We did a mashup of Christmas and Hanukkah;

greydora left on the 23rd so most of the present-opening had happened by that point but we still managed to have a huge pile to do on Christmas morning. The morning of the 26th, we had breakfast with a bunch of HS friends (including one who I hadn't seen since probably spring of our freshman year of college) and then finished packing up. We discovered at that time that our flight from OKC to ORD was already delayed enough that we would miss our connection, so M called and got us rebooked leaving from Tulsa. By the time we got to the airport, that flight was delayed enough that we AGAIN weren't going to make our connection and they rebooked us on a later flight from ORD to BUF.
You can probably guess where this is going. We sat at the gate. We had lunch. We watched the flight get pushed back, and back, and back. And then, as M got up to pace, he noticed that the big board listed us as cancelled. No notice of it at the gate; no customer service person to help us deal with it. We schlepped back out through security and got in line at the ticket counter. It was pretty gratifying to listen to the United ticket agent have to go through phone menu hell just like we mortals do, too. She operated on the (correct) assumption that we would prefer to avoid ORD and got us rebooked for the next day on NWA/Delta with two connections - in MSP and in CVG. We took a discounted hotel room at the Best Western, ate bad Chinese food, and fought with TRex who decided that sleep was optional between the hours of about midnight and 2:30 am.

Saturday 12/27: In which the shit hits the fan (no, really, it hadn't done that yet)
Travel was not awful. We left TUL late due to a thunderstorm - mad props to the NWA pilot who chose to avoid creating a NWA Patented Hostage Situation and didn't board the plane until there was a break in the storm - and had to run like crazy people to make our connection in MSP. Holy cow that airport has grown. I had to run from the very end of terminal A (which is tacked on to the end of C) to the very end of E and when I got to the connecting gate I just stood there and wheezed at the gate agent for a few seconds before panting out "need seat assignments... husband... kid... somehwere... back there..." with a futile handwave in the general direction of Not Where I Am. He was lovely though, and reassured me that we were fine and he even was able to get us three seats together so we didn't have to get on the plane and beg for someone to trade with us. That flight left on time and so we were even able to get some lunch in CVG. While we were in MSP, though, I got a voicemail from our plumber wanting to know how our basement was, because a lot of people were having basement floods due to heavy rains melting the 12-14" of snow that had been on the ground. This made me more than a little nervous.
You can probably guess what the punchline to THIS story is. Our basement was completely flooded again. We called Stanley Steemer and they said they would be out to give us an estimate in a couple of hours. They showed up and after much hemming and hawing and tooth-gnashing and the like, we opted to have them dry and then remove & dispose of the now-ruined carpet (yeah, the carpet that we put in less than three years ago). They told us that there would be "a few puddles" left after that process, so we declined the complete basement drying service and figured we'd be able to shopvac out what was left in the morning.

Sunday 12/28: In which we become seriously pissed-off customers
Sunday morning dawned with signinficantly more than "a few puddles" in the basement (M ultimately removed over 200 gallons of water from the basement after the SS guys left) and the wind gusting to 70 mph. The wind is significant to this story because M had been kind when the SS guys finished at 12:30 the night before and told them they could come back in the morning to get the trash, which was now threatening to blow all over the neighborhood. So at 8:30 am, we called the SS answering service. And we called, and we called, and we called. When we could get through to the service, we got told that the girl couldn't get the dispatcher to return her calls. Eventually (after 2 hours of calling), I told her to pass on the message that I would be filing a complaint with the BBB if I did not hear back from them immediately. Guess what, I got a call 5 minutes later! Of course, that was just the beginning... the dispatcher/manager lied through his teeth for the next several hours about the status of the guy coming to get the trash, about whether or not removing carpet tacks was included in the price of carpet & pad removal (we apparently were not offered that option because the employee thought that we were "trying to save money" and "would have declined it anyway"), and everything else you can imagine. Getting more action out of them took telling them that we would be disputing the charges with the credit card company (which we have done). When the disposal guy showed up, he commented "Oh good, I got here before noon like K told me I should" (keep in mind that 2 hours earlier, K had told us he was "on his way" and an hour and a half earlier he had been "just down the street" when in fact he had not even made it from home to the office yet) and said that he had made several stops BEFORE COMING TO OUR HOUSE. Lying through his teeth was the order of the day for the manager, apparently. Through all of this, M was in the basement shopvaccing like a madman to get it more or less dry.

That was the EXTREMELY SHORT version of the story. The complaint that we are filing with the BBB and the franchise owner is significantly longer than this whole post. Once the SS ordeal was over, we headed out to drive to Lancaster, PA for New Year's with M's family, which was lovely and relaxing. We got home tonight and M and I got increasingly twitchy about what state the house would be in when we arrived. I was the first one in and I immediately noticed that there was no bad smell... the basement is completely dry, thankfully. The plan is to put get the sump pump installed asap (gotta get a couple more estimates first). In the spring, we will put down wood laminate in the family room - the rest of the basement will remain painted concrete. Instead of the laundry room becoming TRex's playroom, we will convert the little bedroom upstairs into a library/playroom and the sewing room will move downstairs to the laundry room (which makes a reasonable amount of sense anyway, when you think about it...).