So my sweetheart and former trip navigator, former because no longer was it necessary for her to keep one finger and one eye on a printed map and the other eye (not finger) on the road signs to help us get from point A to point B, because I always had my hands full wiggling the steering wheel back and forth and singing along with the radio and could not follow a printed map at the same time… anyway, she was on the phone with her Mom and I was driving, trying to get to the LA airport from Santa Monica and, because it took too long to eat, it was only about 90 minutes before our flight time on Sunday.
But not to worry, I had my trusted GPS.
I selected a Favorite from the GPS menu, this particular Favorite was the rental car location where I'd programmed the GPS when we picked up the car on Friday night. Not that rental car locations are really my favorite places to go. I’d much rather have programmed it into a menu category like Places I Gotta Go Back To Even Though I’d Rather Stay On Vacation. But that wasn’t available as a choice on my GPS. Anyway, little did I realize at that time that the GPS hadn't fully found itself on Friday night when we picked up the rental car and I told it to remember that place as a Favorite – who knew a GPS could lose itself – so it tagged my home location as the rental car location. And, um, my home location was... well... home. In Utah. Which is still not a part of California, even though almost everyone moving into Utah comes from California. I failed to notice that it said my end destination was about 600 miles away because that appears in a microscopic oval at the bottom right corner of the tiny GPS screen; and, of course, I didn’t have my reading glasses on because I was driving – not that I’m opposed to reading and driving at the same time, after all, isn’t that why they invented those little half-high reading glasses so you could flip back and forth between seeing things close up and far away, like a book in your lap and the road and traffic in front of you, and if that isn’t what they intended when they invented those glasses, then they should have named them something more specific like reading-but-not-while-you’re-driving glasses. So I didn’t notice that minor destination flaw. Neither did my former navigator.
But not to worry, my GPS was still happily giving me directions routing me along the maze of LA freeways.
So there we were merrily driving along freeways as directed by the GPS until I realized we were southwest of downtown LA and it was telling me to hop on an eastbound freeway. Um, the airport was and probably still is northwest of downtown LA. Or at least west. But definitely not east of downtown.
“This can’t be right,” said my little pea brain. Having learned to pay attention to my pea brain when it chooses to speak, I told Tammy something was wrong and asked her to program the GPS to take us to the LA airport using the Points of Interest in the GPS rather than the programmed Favorite, not that I find airports particularly interesting, but at this point, we were at least somewhat interested in finding it.
So my loyal and trusted navigator, who was now off the phone, did just that. She reprogrammed the GPS to find the airport.
“Recalculating,” said the GPS in that annoying tone all talking GPS units seem to have when they have to change to a different destination as if to say, “Why didn’t you just say that’s where you wanted to go in the first place.” Or, had you done the unthinkable and failed to make a turn as instructed, the GPS had to slap your hands for being naughty and figure out a new way to get you to the destination since you were too dumb to turn when instructed. Although I have found myself making wrong turns just to hear the somewhat sexy female voice with an Australian accent comment on my inability to follow directions. But that’s another story.
So, with the LA airport as the new destination, lo and behold, the GPS told us to turn around to get to the airport. It might have even sounded a bit worried about how long it would now take to get us there, what with our flight only an hour away. I got off the freeway and got back on going the opposite direction. Now I felt better about the direction we were going and my pea brain was wisely silent on the matter.
Please understand that we had not yet figured out why the GPS was leading us astray off into the wasteland of east LA, so fearing it may be leading us to some other bogus location, I asked the world’s most gorgeous navigator to look at the address for the rental car place on the paperwork in the glove box. She did, and along with the address it also had instructions on how to get there. So from those instructions we discovered we were now on the correct freeway, heading west.
Then the unthinkable happened. The instructions on the rental car slip told us to exit on Century Boulevard and drive north to get to the rental car place. But the GPS was telling us to continue west on the freeway. How does one deal with a dilemma of that magnitude? Well, we no longer trusted the wisdom of the GPS because we thought it had been leading us astray; so we decided to rely on the rental car paperwork instructions and we exited the freeway and headed north on Century Boulevard. Six-point-one miles north, to be exact. On a six lane road with stop lights every twenty-seven feet. And I'm pretty sure we had to stop at every light along the way. So after about thirty minutes of driving down this road, we crossed highway 105, which had been coming up as an exit on the freeway we were driving on before taking the Century Boulevard exit.
So my pea brain said, "Hey, bozo, if you'd followed the GPS it would have routed you to this freeway and you'd have been here like twenty-five minutes ago." I pretended not to hear it that time because it was too embarrassing and because it is tough enough for guy to follow directions, especially when doing so initially takes him on a route to who knows where, without saying something out loud that confirms his stupidity in front of his wife.
So we stopped the rental car in the long line of other cars being dropped off. We didn't even wait to for the attendant to give us a receipt or to mention to him that we didn't stop and gas it up first, but this was fine because I'm rental car company club member and that allows me to do that sort of thing and they just email me the receipt with the ten-times-the-normal gas cost added on. And besides, it looked like the attendants had to check in about twenty cars before they’d get to us. We got on the shuttle bus to the airport - about thirty-five minutes before our flight departure time.
Now we were feeling a bit… um… tense about making it to our flight on time. But we felt much better when the charming young lady from Tennessee sitting nearby commented that her flight was in fifteen minutes. After all, fifteen minutes was much shorter than thirty-five. She made thirty-five sound like a leisurely time frame. We could do some sightseeing along the way, we had so much time.
After taking a tour through stops at four terminals before arriving at ours, we decided the sightseeing provided by the shuttle bus driver wasn’t really very much fun after all. We charged into the airport to a check-in kiosk (because I couldn't check us in early at the hotel because there was no printer attached to their public-use computer… come on, who does that… dear hotel guest, here’s a computer, but neener-neener, you can’t print from it) with about twenty-five minutes to go before our flight departure time.
“Whew, we can make it,” said the ridiculously optimistic voice inside my head. After all, I’d caught flights in years gone by where I’d left the car in short-term parking ten minutes before departure time and high-fived the flight attendant as she closed the airplane door behind me.
I put my frequent flyer card in the little slot and the kiosk said I had to ask for assistance for special handling. What? Special Handling? I had no need to be wrapped in bubble wrap. Or to be brought little mint chocolates. What special handling could I possibly need? Just then a little airline kiosk helper popped over and tried to help by entering our check-in information into the kiosk manually, but it said the same thing to her. Go figure. So she directed us to special handling.
On the way there we passed the security check-in line, which had next to no one in it so had we not needed special handling, we’d have sailed through security and made it to the gate with like… minutes… to spare. But instead, by the time we got through the line to the special handling person, it was only twenty minutes before our flight. She sweetly informed us that the airport requires check-in at least forty-five minutes before the scheduled flight to make sure passengers can get through security and to the departure gate on time. Said I, "but when we arrived, if we could have checked in rather than receiving special handling, there was next to no one in the security line and the gate was only fifty yards behind the security line so we could have made our flight, no problem." "Sorry," said the ever-smiling special handler, "that's what the computer does and we can't override it." She explained that for $50 each ticket we could change us to a later flight. So I sweetly said, “Okay,” even though I wanted to tear my hair out and stuff it in… well... you get the idea.
But oh, wait, the next two flights were full so our next option was the 7:45 pm flight. It is now 3:45 pm, about five minutes before our intended flight would be departing. And guess what else! She was unable to do a same-day confirmation flight change until within three hours of the flight. So she couldn’t help us change flights until 4:45. The computer wouldn’t allow it.
“What idiot programmer thought that restriction up!” Okay, so I didn’t actually say that. I just kind of looked at her with a dumbfounded expression. She then suggested we could walk a mile back to the international terminal and get dinner, then come back if we wanted to – this because all the food vendors in the domestic terminals are by the gates, behind airport security. You should be proud of me. I didn’t tell her to stuff it.
Instead, we sat and waited for an hour. Then we waited through the special handling line again and finally we got confirmed on the later flight after explaining the entire story to a new special handling person because the one we originally talked to was busy helping another happy customer. But as we were wrapping things up with our new special handler, our favorite old special handler popped over to ask if we'd been able to get everything worked out okay. We assured her that yes, we were well taken care of, and that everything was fine - this because we were terrified that the computer system might revoke our tickets for being rude if we'd said what we were really thinking... that this was just a clever way to get extra money out of otherwise happy travelers who just happen to arrive a teensie-weensie bit late.
Then we got to wait another three hours for our new flight to leave. But eventually it did, with us on it, miracle of miracles. So we arrived home about four hours later and one-hundred dollars poorer than we'd planned. Oh, and we also got to eat the extraordinary quisine and the five-star food vendor near our airport departure gate. What a treat!
I long for the days of yore when non-timely folks like me could arrive at the airport ten minutes before flight time, park in short term parking, run in and say “hi” and “bye” to the attendant as he or she shut the airplane door behind me. Remember when a person could call their travel agent and change flights without a hassle or fee? Or just pop on a flight as standby if you happened to miss yours? Yea, those were the good old days.
Okay, I'm done grumping.
And I guess I learned a lesson too: it is better to arrive at the airport so early that you could actually drive or walk to your intended destination quicker than it takes to get to the airport, park, check in, do security, wait at the gate, board the plane, fly, eat peanuts and drink Diet Coke, fly some more, deplane, get your rental car, and escape from the airport maze. Lesson learned.
Oh, and one last lesson: read the fine print on your GPS display because, try as it might, it just isn't smarter than the person who programmed it.
