Disaster! With only 1 hour at LAX to clear immigration, collect my baggage, pass customs, re-check my baggage, pass domestic security and get the fuck onto my New York flight; I made it to the gate with fully five minutes to spare before the scheduled take-off time.
This was despite the total lack of helpful signage, flight information screens and even escalators to take you from the ground to the 4th floor as required. (LAX is getting some renovations and, apparently, commuters don’t need all these fancy trimmings.)
Naturally, the gate was closed, locked and abandoned by all airline staff.
Lucky for me a surly janitor was able (though apparently unwilling) to point me in the direction of the United Airlines customer service desk.
Unlucky for me the service desk was clogged with approximately 100 other people who had variously missed their connections or had been booted off a flight to Denver that had been unceremoniously cancelled, leaving 200 people in the lurch. Apparently this is what flying domestic in the USA is like All. The. Time.
Joy.
At this point I would like to make special mention of the lack of organised ground operations. At no point during immigration, customs or domestic security processing was any attempt made to identify and/or fast-track commuters with a time critical connection – I am pretty sure this is a standard activity in Australian airports.
So I get in the queue and I wait, and I wait, and I wait, wait, wait, wait. I miss the next available flight while I am waiting. Finally I reach the front. I am put on the stand-by list for the next flight and I bugger off to the gate to await my milky doom.
While I am sat typing this – Success! My name is called and I am on the flight. It’s two hours later than my original, and jeebus knows where my bags will be, but I am one step closer to getting where I needed to go.
Post script: it turns out, presumably because this sort of shenanigan happens all the freakin’ time, UA were competent enough to get my bags switched on to the actual flight I was actually moved onto. So it all turned out for the best in the end.
And now I am in my hotel in Manhattan watching Adult Swim and waiting for the sleepiness to kick in. There seems to be quite the happening club on downstairs, which I would totally check out if I had not only had 5 hours for intermittent doze time in the past 24.
Please sleep, take me. Take me now!
