Oh, it's much worse than you think

I'll boil down my travel travails as much as I can to get to the good parts...

As I already mentioned, it was my second leg's half hour lateness that caused me to miss the last flight out of Vegas to Eugene. Around midnight I was given a hotel voucher and told to be back by 5:30am for a morning Delta flight to Eugene via Salt Lake City, so with five hours to kill, naturally I went to Mandalay and played some poker.

Five hours later and $115 richer (assuming you, like me, prefer to count taxi fare as a loss) I returned to the airport. Unfortunately, I was rejected from the Delta flight because of a clerical error -- apparently my ticket number was in the US Airways format and not the Delta format. Standing in about six lines solved this problem -- but then the Delta people told me I was too late for that flight, and they wouldn't be able to get me to Eugene until 7pm or so.

US Airways told me that I could wait that long, or I could hop on a flight to Phoenix, where I would be on standby for a noon flight to Eugene. I expressed concern that, if I didn't make it onto the plane (since they're always overbooked on the holidays anyway), I'd just be stuck in Phoenix for an extra six hours, which would be infinitely worse than being stuck in Vegas with an unused hotel voucher for that long. However I was told that my chances were good. So off to Phoenix I went.

That plan, of course, sucked. I asked for a hotel voucher in Phoenix (because at this point I had been travelling for around 20 hours and needed a nap), but was turned down. I had to sleep on hard chairs in the sunlight while little kids squealed all around me. It was 100% lame.

Possible ideas:

• Pneumatic tubes. You know, like at the bank, but with people. I think that's how they travelled from city to city in Starship Troopers.


• I have a theory that we can bend spacetime by putting something really massive, like a black hole, maybe in the Midwest somewhere. That would bring the two coasts a lot closer together, but maybe only for a few nanoseconds before we all die.


• Teleportation, specifically as seen in The Fly. As in the Southpark episode in which Mr. Garrison invents a new mode of travel that operates by penetrating your mouth and rectum: "Well, it beats dealing with airline companies."