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FEATURE
REAL World 2008
Austin or bust!
Issue: 6.4 (May/June 2008)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 19,524
Starting Page Number: 11
Article Number: 6408
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
REAL World 2008 had an inauspicious beginning, at least for me. I woke up at four a.m. on Tuesday, March 18th, to head off to the airport for my 8:50 a.m. flight to Texas (I live over an hour away from the Portland, Oregon airport, and I needed to make a stop on the way, so I had to leave my house at six). The first clue that things were not well was when I turned on the TV as I was getting ready and saw the U.S. weather map showing thunderstorms in two parts of the country: Oregon/Washington and Texas. "Great," I thought, "bad weather in both of the places where I'll be." A few hours later, having survived the adventures of the security check and boarded the plane, I was napping as we waited for take-off clearance. Then the pilot came on to announce a weather delay due to the storms in the Dallas area. An hour an half later, he came back to announce that the flight had been canceled.
Now I fully realize weather is out of the control of the airlines, but the way they handled the aftermath was extremely poor: we were merely given slips of paper with an 800 number to call -- which just gave a busy signal for the next two hours. The American Airlines front desk was no more help: over 200 people standing in line while a single rep chatted on the phone and served no one.
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