trip from hell

I actually considered getting off the plane at Detroit and going back home, because even then I could tell this was gonna be the trip from hell. This was after two hours of sitting in the 100% full plane at the gate growing increasingly cramped and increasingly dreading the 8 hour flight to come. As the mechanics pumped up the landing gear a bit, then put some more fuel on the plane (for storms over the North Sea; shouldn't you always have fuel for storms?), then fiddled with the landing gear again, then took off luggage crates for passengers who gave up and went home. Which is half of why I didn't, I was not going to delay the whole flight by another half an hour. Besides, I want to go to Germany and hack, damnit. So I sat there as the flight attendants trotted out increasingly wacky explanations.

(BTW, I noticed that they name rows on the plane with my initials, which is weird cause I never noticed that before, probably due to being in my right mind generally when flying. Also the tube from Detrot's concourse C to the rest of the airport is .. trippy.)

But that was only the beginning of course, that hardly qualifies as a trip from hell. Of course I arrived in Amsterdam 10 minutes after my flight to Germany had left. I was told that every other flight today was overbooked already, and I could only go on standby. The one bright point is this let me meet Wichert in the airport again and chat a bit. Of course I didn't get on the next flight.. but this is where it gets strange.

After being passed through countless transfer desks and ticket clerks, one of them actually took a look at my remaining ticket. And it wasn't a ticket from Amsterdam to Bremen, but one from Detroit to Amsterdam. Yes, they had switched the tickets, and nobody apparently reads these things, and somehow I arrived all the way over here with no ticket to my final destination, with my luggage in limbo (she didn't think I had any for quite a while). At this point all the ticket clerks concorded that I was on a trip from hell.

At this point I gave up and convinced them to comp me a hotel and put me on a flight tomorrow that may not have passengers hanging out the cockpit windows. That will make the total roundtrip duration some 55 hours for a visit that will now be only 72 hours. Urgh.