Hong Kong or Bust!

I don’t know if the pilot of Air Canada flight 35 was cruising Porn Sites (“Girls Gone Flannel”?), or what have you, but the intercom squawked to life and informed us passengers that an onboard computer had frozen (I’m guessing he didn’t want to use the word “crashed”). The problem arose just a few minutes after the jet was pushed back and turned to taxi. Apparently Air Canada’s IT Department was trying to guide the officers through a re-boot. They’re lucky to have that support… if my company’s team was running their show, then the wounded Airbus would have been absconded and donated to a charity.

There we sat for about twenty minutes when we were granted an update. Turns out that the repair had now shifted to the maintenance department. We were now waiting for someone to climb under the plane and “jiggle some circuit breakers”. I think Air Canada contracts their maintenance out to Bill’s CITGO.

One passenger panicked because he was going to miss a connection, and had his travel agent book him on a different airline. The plane returned to the gate, and disgorged the impatient fellow. As a consequence, and according to someone’s regulations (Air Canada? TSA? The Department of Redundancy Department?), everyone had to deplane on the off chance that the escaping passenger had left something nasty behind… like a bomb, or maybe a floater or, god forbid… a Yanni CD.

With all of this runaround, it became apparent that two passengers would miss important connections. One was a young woman heading to Narita, Japan and the other was yours truly, planning to end up in Hong Kong. A rather frazzled Gate Agent leapt into action and soon re-booked us on United. While I was handed a ticket to Tokyo and I presume my fellow displaced person got her Boarding Pass to Hong Kong, we were informed that we had to wait for our checked bags. This took another thirty minutes because the Jet was still running (apparently they had not yet found the right fuse to jiggle). We used this time productively to swap destinations.

Soon enough, bags in tow, we clambered out of Air Canada… in fact out of Terminal B and made our way over to United. There, we passed through security a second time and then we parted company. She headed to the First Class Lounge while I decided to hang out with the Proletariat mingling about the gate area. Six and three quarter hours after leaving my house, I was still on the ground in Boston.

Finally on a fully functioning plane, the relatively short hop to Chicago was perfectly lovely. But on the next and longest leg to Hong Kong (15 hours maybe?) I was seated next to woman named Bea. Judging by her impressive accumulation of avoirdupois, I guessed that her full name was probably “Bea Hemuth”. Our flight took us north over the Arctic, yet Bea was still sweating, so she kept all of the air nozzles on full blast. I wore a sweatshirt and covered myself with a blanket to ward off the chill. Bea started off chatty and, unfortunately, two glasses of champagne, several glasses of wine and a brandy with dessert only seemed to make her more loose-lipped. Her favorite topic was the merits of various restaurants she had visited. Go figure. It seemed to me that the Flight Attendants serving cart was more or less permanently positioned at our row. When they were otherwise occupied my next door neighbor would pull out a bag of Cheese Doodles to carry her through the intermission. I was afraid to doze off for fear that if I stopped moving she might eat me.

The rest of the trip went uneventfully, although I arrived in HK three hours later than originally planned. The only hiccups were that the power outlet at my seat didn’t work, so when my laptop battery pooped out, I was SOL. And I lost a pair of cheap reading glasses (note to self: Don’t loop glasses into T Shirt when needing to lean over and collect bags from the carousel).