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Yesterday was a really bad day for Shelly. She spent the last two days working in Huntington Beach, and was supposed to be on the 8pm flight from Long Beach to Oakland on Jet Blue. The day at work ended up being slower than expected, and so she called Jet Blue and got on the 4pm flight instead. She got to the airport with plenty of time to spare, and everything was going fine…

4pm came and went, and she was still waiting to board the plane. They announced a delay at the gate because they were waiting for a flight crew. I looked online for her, and let her know that mobile.jetblue.com was showing the flight as being delayed until 5pm. It was then that I left work and headed to pickup Lane…

A few minutes after 5pm, I checked mobile.jetblue.com and saw that her flight status had changed to CANCELLED. Oh, crap. I gave her a call and knew from the way she answered the phone that she had no idea yet. I told her the news, and a few minutes later it was announced to everyone else at the gate over the PA. A made scramble ensued as everyone began trying to get on other flights. She was about 20 people from the front of the line, and it wasn’t really moving very quickly.

She called me and asked for help, and so I pulled off the freeway and put my Verizon Wireless aircard to work. Got on the Jet Blue website and tried to reschedule her flight, but the website would allow that. I called Jet Blue for her while merging back into traffic. About 15 minutes later, I was being told that the soonest Jet Blue could get her on a flight back to Oakland was Saturday. SATURDAY!??!?!?!

A few deep breaths later, I ensured that we were being fully credited for this debacle, and then nicely ended the call (I know that it doesn’t pay to scream at these CSR’s over the phone, because it really doesn’t get you anywhere and it really isn’t their fault).

I did some quick searches on Expedia, Southwest, etc, and realized pretty quickly that there were no available flights from Long Beach to any of the three Bay Area airports for the rest of the day. Luckily for me, Southwest had a big search box on the right side of their page that suggested changing the search to an airport other than Long Beach and Oakland. A quick change helped me find an 8p flight from Orange County to San Jose!

I called Shelly back and told her to get in a cab and head to OC while I booked her on a flight. After a stop at the ATM, she was in a cab and $65 poorer from the flat-rate cab ride 22 miles to John Wayne airport…

While she sat in rush hour traffic down the 405, I pulled up to Grandma Linda’s house and ran into the house with my laptop – Verizon aircard still pumping away. Got her booked on the flight home, and sent her all the info via TXT MSG. Deep breaths…

Called her and then we both realized that she was flying into San Jose, not Oakland. Well, her car was parked in Long Term parking at Oakland. Oooof. Okay, now to deal with that…

Managed to get a hold of Grandma JuJu, and persuaded her to go out to dinner with Lane and I before driving to Oakland Airport to drive Shelly’s car home. After dinner at Chili’s, we quickly got Shelly’s car home and then still managed to have a few minutes for me to fix her computer and for Lane to play with her kitties.

Lane and I then drove down to San Jose airport and picked up Shelly, nearly 7 hours after she started her rather exciting journey.

In hindsight, it was a good thing that she changed her flight. Jet Blue ended up having to cancel all of their remaining flights for the day because of the storms in the Northeast. All their flight crews were stuck because of canceled flights from the storms…