First off, a big thanks to Straphanger Joe for stepping in to keep the site fresh in my absence.

The family vacay was great–sun, beach, and an endless supply of buffet food and cerveza in the Dominican Republic. All we needed was a decent flight home Saturday to close the happy loop.

Indeed, New York was downright besieged by nasty weather. Despite the Male Stewardess on Delta assuring me that a little wind in New York wouldn’t slow us down–the CNN on our tiny airplane TV said winds were about 68 mph at JFK–the plane banged a left as soon as we crossed the U.S. coast, and headed for a surprise stop in Atlanta instead of JFK.

Atlanta Hartsfield is legendary for its busy-ness; add untold thousands of pissed off New Yorkers, sunburned and perhaps even still sand in the crotch, rerouted from the likes of the DR, Puerto Rico, Orlando, etc., and it was just mayhem–no one knowing where to go or what to do, people cutting lines to nowhere, a jammed airport suddenly swollen like the banks of the Bronx River. The worst of human nature at its best.

Two little ones in tow, we saw no hope in crashing in the airport, and quickly booked a room at a nearby Hilton for what certainly seemed like a reasonable rate, at least by New York standards. Thank God for the Blackberry.

We checked in around 10:30 p.m. and, after getting Little Miss C and Little G to bed, I huddled over the Blackberry again from our bathroom. Calls to Delta’s main line got the immediate busy signal, but calls to the Sky Miles club (like I’m really a member) actually were met with a human. I got a nice lady named Bobbie who repeatedly attemped to get us on a flight the next day, but as soon as something became available, it was quickly grabbed.

“It’s like…moving pictures,” she said, not quite the apt metaphor but I got the picture.

She eventually got us on two flights: the Missus and Little Miss C on an 8 a.m., and me and Little G on an 8:15er.

It was close to midnight. We’d lost an hour coming from the Dominican, and were about to lose another due to daylight savings. We shut out the night’s misery and slept.

And woke up five hours later to get the kids together and get to the airport.

It was pitch black and cold behind the Hilton in Atlanta. The queue for the freakin’ airport shuttle was 50 deep, despite a pair of short buses making the run.

Our clothes better suited for the Dominican than ATL’s surprising chill, we lost about 10 minutes waiting for an available bus—an amount of time that would bite us on the ass later.

The airport was pretty much the same madhouse as the night before; massive lines for everything. We finally checked luggage and the Missus and Little Miss C bolted for their 8 a.m. flight, us boys a bit behind.

[LUGGAGE UPDATE: It’s noon on Tuesday and our three suitcases are still AWOL.]

[LUGGAGE UPDATE II: It’s 3 p.m. on Wednesday and our three suitcases are still AWOL.]

[LUGGAGE UPDATE III: No luggage as of 10:30 a.m. Thursday.]

Security was downright slammed; the girls breezed through, though, as Little Miss C was in a stroller. They made their plane.

Me and Little G, however, stuck in security, missed it by five minutes.

And so our 12 hour ordeal at Hartsfield began, as we rode the monorail to various stops (A, B, E) and attempted to go standby on various flights (9:50, noon, etc.). The standby boarding passes piled up in my pocket like spent OTB slips.

The system is more crooked than a New York governor. We were #s 17 and 18 for the 9:50 flight, then #63 and 64 for the nooner. If you think you’re prioritized because you’re traveling with a hungry, underslept 4 year old, you’re sorely mistaken.

The standby crowd gradually got to know one another as we schlepped from gate to gate like migrant workers. We got to talking with Tom from Ardsley, a 40-something who was traveling with two senior citizen females, perhaps one of them being his mother, and one of them in a wheelchair.

In between playing dinosaurs with Little G (Little Foot goes to a scary place called Meat-Eater-Ville and has a close call with a hungry T Rex called Sharptooth, played over and over and over with minor variations), we kept calling the Sky Miles hotline on the Blackberry, and were told the earliest possible flight to New York was Tuesday morning—a full 48 hours away.

Just as we’d looked into flights to Baltimore, Phila and Washington, Tom From Ardsley had tried Cincy, Detroit, anywhere that would get him and his ladies out of Atlanta and toward New York.

We realized there are two approaches to getting nasty with an airline employee. You can get just simply downright nasty with no real strategy for getting results, as we’d seen the mook dumbass in the Yankee shirt do the night before as he rammed his SmartCart (the only smart part of his operation) past a line of stranded stragglers to show an airline employee he was angry about the disorganization and lack of communication. (In fact I sat across from the aisle from that mook dumbass on the flight to the DR; when the 8:30 a.m. departure hadn’t happened by 8:35, he yelled, “It’s 8:35, c’mon, let’s go-oohhh!!”

The other approach is what Tom From Ardsley did—yell and scream but do it in a way that nudges the employee into producing some sort of gainful result.

After failing to successfully cajole an employee at the Blackberry store near our gate to let us have a courtesy charge, we bought a new charger–35 bucks, if you’re scoring at home. After a brief charge, we got on the horn again, and scored our first break in 24 hours: a flight the next morning.

Suddenly our mood lifted; I began seeing Atlanta in a positive light. Get a hotel room downtown, see the sights with Little G, drink the native Coca Cola, see where Andre 3000 grew up, be up in the air inside of 24 hours. It sounded eminently doable.

Meanwhile, Tom From Ardsley was working a Delta employee pretty hard, and got results: a flight to Newark that afternoon. Tom told me he’d told the man that me and Little G needed to get out that day too, and that we should talk to the Delta guy.

I weighed my options: the flight the next morning was OK by me, but leaving that day would be unthinkably good. I approached him, hoisting Little G up to eye level so the Delta guy could see the sadness and tiredness in the whelp’s mug.

The Delta guy was Michael Hagans, a handsome black man with a gigantic, winning smile. I told him my new pal Tom From Ardsley said he had some magic powers to get people home. Hagans smiled that megasmile and began typing.

He typed for several minutes. On cue, Little G whined about how miserable he was.

“It’s OK, Little G, I know you’re exhausted,” I said, pinching his bottom to maximize the look of despair on his face. “This man is going to do his best to help us get home.”

I may have muttered something about the kid’s emergency medication back in New York, I’m not sure.

Hagans asked if we’d go to Newark. Sure, the gals went to JFK, but they’d probably be home long before use anyway. Absolutely, I told him.

Typing. More typing. More freakin’ typing. Magic fingers coming up with the winning keyboard combination.

“OK,” said Hagans. “You’re all set. Two seats flying to Newark at 5:30 today.”

I shook Hagans’ hand, though I would’ve preferred to kiss him. Little G gave him an emphatic high five. I hugged Little G.

“Keep taking care of your family,” Hagans told me, words I may not forget for a long time.

We were over the moon. We celebrated by riding an escalator to a Heineken-branded restaurant, which was set apart from the rest of the dreaded airport. We got lunch and set about working on Little G’s airplane Lego model we’d bought at the gift shop. Buying it was alternately brilliant and foolish; it would occupy a bored, cranky four year old for hours, but it also required intense concentration to put together, and that was in short supply after the previous 12 hours’ events. Plus, I’m just not that hot at models and other spatial-relations-related exercises.

The food came, a chicken cordon bleu sandwich, a grilled cheese, some chips, Sprites. The house music played some country broad – Shania, Trisha, I dunno – covering, fittingly, Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home.” “I’m on my way, I’m on my way,” she twanged. “Home…sweeeeet…home.”

And, five hours and endless dinosaur role playing later, we were. I must’ve stared at my boarding pass a dozen times, making sure it was real, treating it like the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Our seats were in the rear of the plane, but that didn’t stop us from pushing to the front as soon as they started boarding the rich people and using the face of an exhausted four year old to our advantage. They let us on, and we locked into our seats like we’d never give them up—whether or not Delta found the nine people it needed to opt for the $600 voucher and night in Detroit to solve its little overbooking problem.

Soon as the wheels went up, Little G fell asleep. I looked down at him, curled up so tiny in his seat, and it just hit me, my mind a jumble of SmartCarts and droning Delta announcements and Monorail rides and Little G scared by the unnecessarily loud auto-flush toilets. I dropped a tear the size of a whiskey shot on my sleeping son.

PAST PLANEJOTTINGS INVOLVING DELTA HERE

I heard it yesterday and then again today. It could be I’ve missed it before while in a straphanger fog. But two days in a row means it’s probably real and not an illusion.

Yesterday I was on the F train coming home at about 6:36pm. The train was sparsely populated with lots of empty seats. I looked up from my book when the announcement came on because we were stopped between stations at the time and I thought the announcement would be about a delay on the line. I pay attention to delays.”Ladies and gentlemen,” the conductor’s voice began. “A crowded subway is no excuse for a crime of sexual misconduct.” There was more, but I lost some wondering why he was talking about a crowded subway when the car wasn’t even a quarter full. I looked around to see if I was missing some large grouping of people all pushed together somewhere out of my line-of-sight. The conductor might also have said, “sexual harassment crime” instead of “sexual misconduct,” but that could just be me, hearing things, because I’m taking my agency’s, mandatory all-staff-must-attend, yearly workshop on sexual harassment in the workplace on Friday.  I looked for a pen to write down what I’d heard, but by the time I found one the lines were already fading from my memory. There was something about, “… report the crime to your nearest MTA official.” It could have been farthest MTA official, or nearest police, or farthest transit officer, but I missed it so I don’t know.

Today at 5:38pm, on a half full V train sitting at 23rd street, an announcement came on the loudspeaker that sounded like it was a canned PSA. “There is no excuse for sexual misconduct on the subway. If you believe you have been the victim of a crime please contact… ” I missed the rest while I wrote the first part down. I have to learn how to write faster. This time there was nothing to do with a crowded subway and it was followed by an announcement on the train intercom, right above my head about delays in front of us and all trains going express on the F line.

A cityroom blog at the NY Times from October 2, 2009 has the full quote. It seems the campaign was originally a subway advertisement PSA. It said, “Sexual Harassment is a Crime in the subway, too — A crowded train is no excuse for an improper touch. Don’t stand for it or feel ashamed, or be afraid to speak up. Report it to an M.T.A. employee or police officer.” There’s some cause and effect. A June 2006 incident following a July 2007 poll of 1,800 straphangers stating that a large proportion of women had been harassed or assaulted, culminating in the written PSA in September 2009, a slew of handouts (neither of which I’ve ever seen) and either a verbal PSA or a conductor taking the initiative and doing a live version in March of 2010. A four year odyssey to try and address a problem that’s been around since the beginning of time. The problem, as usual with these kinds of campaigns, is it puts the onus on women to do something about it. Don’t feel ashamed or be afraid to speak up, the PSA says, as if the problem is that women aren’t speaking up rather than men behaving badly. Why not a message to all the people who see it happen and don’t say a word, saying, Speak up - don’t allow sexual harassment on the subway. Or, Don’t let men get away with this abuse. Or better yet, why not address the perpetrators with, Sexual misconduct on this train is a crime and won’t be tolerated. Don’t do it or you’ll end up in jail.

Maybe that will be next years campaign.

I rarely fly, so when it comes to people who get to moan about the woeful state of airline travel today, I’m clearly at the back of the  line.

Nonetheless, lend me your ears, as I’ve some first-class kvetching to do.

I was on an 11 a.m. Delta flight to Myrtle Beach this  morning for a quick work trip. It’s one of those tiny airplanes that Delta outsources to Comair, with maybe 20 rows. We were due in at 1 pm.

At 11:02, a cheery stewardess (I know, I know, flight  attendant) comes on the mike.

“It’ll be just a little minute while we take care of some paperwork,” she said, explaining how there was some FAA papers that had to be signed  off on by the Feds, and it  would be a few moments until that  got  done. ”We should be moving in just a  few moments,” she  said.

11:17, the  captain comes on. He explains that the “logbook” is moving around between the plane and the airport; indeed, that  white van we saw out  the window was couriering it as  he spoke.

“We should be moving  in 1o to 15 minutes,” he said, as  everyone groaned.  

11:55, Capitano comes back on the mike. “It’s FAA bureaucracy, folks, there’s nothing we can do about it,”  he  says. “It’s  just out of our hands. Soon as  the paperwork comes back, we’ll get you going.”

Groans, a lot of them. Suddenly the tiny Comair rig feels  even smaller and more bereft of air.

12:05, an extraordinarily chipper  stewardess grabs the mike. 

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEEENNN!” she  bellows in her best ring-annnouncer voice. “The cabin door has closed, and we’ll be moving in just a moment.”

The passengers let out an exhale of relief.

Then there’s a bit of comedy. The stewardess  comes  around to collect the trash we’ve created in the  last 90-odd minutes: cups, napkins, nails I’ve picked  down to the cuticle.  The woman in front  of me, who looked like Andre the Giant from the neck up and answered to the name ”Phyllis” (I heard  her say so on her cell), hands the stewardess a cup, a plastic wrapper…and a used tissue.

“I’m not taking your tissue,” the  stewardess, a lanky blonde woman of  50, says through clenched teeth. As she walks away from Andre the  Giant, she lets loose an audible “Geez!”

Ah, the mirth was  short-lived.

12:30, the captain comes back  on. 

“Folks,” he starts, and we know right away.

“The plane is not equipped to fly in icy conditions,  and the  forecast calls  for thunderstorms.”

Icy conditions. It’s 80 in New York and 90 in Myrtle. Icy fucking conditions.

El Capitan then tells  us we must deplane.

Broken and beaten, we gather our personal items and shuffle off the plane.

PART II

12:20, and we’re on a little  bus taking us back to the terminal so we can switch from gate 5A to gate 2. We trudge up the  ramp and back into the terminal. Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” plays, and it completely fails to capture the mood–too soothing, too mystical. I would’ve prefered “I Wanna Be  Sedated.”

We shuffle over to gate 2 and learn that our plane  has just arrived, and  it’ll take  some time to “service” it. The monitor says we’ll have a  1:05 departure.

Perhaps the least pleasant  aspect of all this  is  hearing the 42 different versions of the same experience as my fellow passengers phone  their loved ones.

12:44, that  song that goes  “Howww longgg…Has  this been going on?” comes  on the house music. That’s a little more like it. It’s followed by  “King of Pain”, which seems terribly apt as well.

1 p.m., the time we were supposed to land in Myrtle Beach, we are told to commence boarding  the  new plane. “Make  one line!” yells the Delta employee, as they need to reissue boarding passes due to the different configuration of our new plane, which, God  willing, is  equipped  with the proper icing equipment.

It’s a bit awkward getting  the  large  mass of irritated  bodies pooled around the desk into a single-file line, but we  make do. Out  of the corner of my eye,  I see none other than the Andre  the Giant lady  inching up on my left flank.  I slide my laptop case over to block her.

A  worker finishes the  lady in front  of me and  I wait to be  acknowledged. Andre  the Giant skirts  around  my laptop case and  heads  to the desk.

The day wouldn’t be complete  without a Larry David cringeworthy moment, so I say, “Excuse me,  there’s a line.”

She shoots me the  dirtiest of looks–coming  from a lumpy mug that looks like Andre the Giant,  it’s a harrowing  experience. “She’s  ready!” she says. I tell Andre I’ll wait for the  lady to signal to me. (There’s  already been enough  trouble with paperwork today, so I certainly don’t want  to distract the  Delta  employees.) 

“Really, you can go ahead,” I say, mostly sarcastically.

To my surprise, she does.

1:30, the plane  starts to taxi. 

1:50, still  taxiing. The plane is like  Nomar Garciaparra, adjusting batting gloves, tapping feet, OCD-addled  brain looking for just the right feel before taking  off.

1:53,  pilot gets on. We hold  our collective breath.  “We’re #3 for takeoff,” he  says. (Don’t say ‘just  a little minute!’ Don’t say ‘just a little  minute!’)

1:59, we do, in fact, take off–a minute  shy of three  hours after we  were supposed  to.

 We touch down in Myrtle at 3:22. I climb down the narrow,  steep stairs that lead to the pavement, thinking of the Beatles at Idlewild, Gerald Ford moments before  a  tumble, and other world leaders  who’ve taken narrow,  steep stairs down from small planes.

It’s 90 and muggy beyond belief. But  somewhere between here and  heaven, there is ice, and  a plane that could not  deal with it.

A power outtage on the Upper East Side and the Bronx is causing delays on the evening commute.

From lohud.com:

“Because we do not have full power, we are not able to run a full schedule of trains at this time,” [MTA spokesperson Marjorie Anders] said. ” We can operate only one train per track between Grand Central and Morris Heights on the Hudson Line and from Grand Central to Tremont on the Harlem and New Haven Lines.”

Blackberry us if you’re sitting in train hell, or humming right along.

My first glimpse of the Mamaroneck platform this morning told me something was wrong. There were way too many people standing around looking even less happy than usual.

While I’m used to standing on the ride home, not getting a seat in the morning is not something I can recover from easily so to preserve my professional effectiveness I immediately went into full seat-scrounging mode. With the extra time I obviously had I hiked to the opposite end of the platform from my usual hangout. When a train finally pulled in (5 minutes late for me - probably more than 30 minutes late for many on the platform who had been trying to get on an earlier train) some quick footwork allowed me to score a window seat with full sleeping privileges.

Within a couple of stops the magnitude of my victory was apparent as the train went from merely crowded to officially “packed to the gills” as you can see from the above photo. Probably a minute after that photo was taken I was sound asleep. Gotta enjoy the good times while you can. Next time it’ll be me standing up there.