Maryanne tries to go to the UK

[Kyle] Well with Maryanne finally off work, she had planned to spend a month in the UK getting reaquainted with all of the friends and family her job hasn't allowed her to see over the years. All of the flights to Newark (the first leg of her journey) were overbooked except the 6:15am flight that I was going to work on because it was the only sure thing. Her flight to Gatwick (which had lots of available seats) was at 6:55pm and my show time for my flight to Atlanta was 6:30pm so we figured we would just get to Newark and hang out together all day until our respective flights.

Maryanne being who she is, she insisted on checking in for her flight 10 hours early since we were already there. Lucky she did! the gate agent said that flight was cancelled! After some digging, she found out it was because the airplane had sustained ground damage in Gatwick and wouldn't be returning that day. This, of course, meant that all of those people on the cancelled flight would be rolled over onto the next (and last) flight. Seats were disappearing fast.

Not wanting Maryanne to get stuck in stinkin' Newark overnight (or possibly even days as the backlog clears) I found a flight from Houston that was only half full. The next flight to Houston from Newark was overbooked and was leaving in 20 minutes from the other side of the airport. We decided to make a run for it and got there just in time. A few people hadn't shown up so Maryanne got a seat. If she hadn't tried to check in so early, she never would have made it.

Stress over - sort of.

As I was finishing my breakfast in the employee cafeteria an hour later, I get a message from Maryanne saying she's still there! Apparently, the building lost power so they were not able to pull back the jetway, then they spent so much time waiting, they had to be refueled. Maryanne wanted to know if she would miss her connection. I looked it up and it looks like she will be fine. The only potential snag is that they ran out of overhead space on the Newark - Houston flight and said that they would send her bag to Gatwick but at the time, I only had time to book her as far as Houston so she may lose time sorting that out in Houston.

At the moment, she managed to finally takeoff for Houston about 30 minutes ago and everything still looks good for her. The UK is not getting out of it that easy!