Anatomy of a Chinese cluster fuck (or "How you can connect through your original departure airport")

Those who've been in and around the US armed forces for any length of time will be familiar with the term "clusterfuck." This is a situation which has degenerated to near-total chaos, with little prayer of any of it coming to a point where it makes any sense at all. A Chinese one is where it's degenerated to absolute chaos with no prayer of returning to any sense of normalcy. Luckily for me, I get to be in the middle of a Chinese cluster fuck today.

I'm on my way to Chicago. As I type this, I am sitting in the Denver International Airport awaiting a flight to Colorado Springs. "Wait," my regular readers will say. "Don't you live in Colorado Springs? Why are you flying there?"

Yes, I do live in Colorado Springs. The fact that I'm flying there is the icing on the cake of my current situation. Let's start a blow-by-blow of the day, and you'll see how this Chinese... well... you know... came into being.

At 04:45, my alarm went off. I must admit that 04:45 and I have not been on speaking terms in a very long time. If one needs, however, to be at the airport for a flight at 06:30, one needs to get one's ass out of bed at an obscenely early point in the morning. That's what I did. Ready to roll at 05:00, I get in Amy's car, and attempt to turn the key. Note the word "Attempt" in that previous statement. The key won't budge. We try to push it out of the way. No dice. We make an early morning rescue call to her ex husband to get me to the airport on time. Dude was very kind and did not tell us that this was NHFP (Not His F-ing Problem) and did pick us up. More on this later.

Fortunately, flying out of Colorado Springs is much easier than flying out of places like Denver or Chicago. This means that I zoomed through check-in and security and my seat was barely warm by the time the boarding call came. Hot dog, we're ready to roll... or are we?

Those of you who've read my travel commentary in the past will be aware that my colleagues have an unofficial "Never travel with Pappert" rule. It's just a bad scene, as I always have SOMETHING go wrong. Wife stuck without a ticket in Italy. Overnight stranding in London. If it can go wrong, something will. Don't travel with me. Ever.

Anyhow... We are on the plane when the captain got on the overhead and said that Denver was socked in with fog. Ugh. That's what I need... a delay with a tight connection. Being sharper than average, I get on the phone and call United to get rebooked for the morning's flight to Chicago. Friendly lady gets me a booking on the next flight out and wishes me well. Great. No problems.

Until I got to Denver, there were no problems, anyhow. When I got to the gate, dude says to me "I don't have you booked on this aircraft." Argh! I call United and try to get re-booked and the nice fellow in India tells me that my flight left on time, and the fact that I missed it means I'd have to pay a re-booking fee. At that point, my slow simmer turns into a rolling boil. I call American Express travel, the folks through whom my business travel is arranged. They call UAL and get the same story, BUT (light at end of tunnel) I may be able to get some help from the folks at the courtesy counter. Yeah, right.

I wander over to the courtesy counter, and the lady says to me, "I can get you on a flight at 19:40. It'll arrive in Chicago around 23:40." Uh, no. I took the early flight cuz I have work to do, hun. You can do better. She can't. I suggest Milwaukee, Midway, and Indy. No, no, and no. She then gets creative (something for which I'm certain for which the folks at United will sack her). "I found you a flight, but there's a connection."

Great. "You won't like it," says she.

I don't care. I just have to get to Chicago. What's the problem? "You have to return from whence you came." So now, I left Colorado Springs to catch a plane in Denver so that I can get a plane in Colorado Springs so that I can get to Chicago. Got that? Me, either. That's why they call this type of thing a "Chinese cluster fuck" and not a garden variety one.

On to the car... Amy looks online to see what kind of problems she can find with the ignition switch on a Ford Focus. She finds something, and I am not making this up, which says that this is a common occurrence in the Focus. The permanent resolution? A new ignition switch. The short term solution? A hammer.

Yes, a hammer. Apparently, there's a little thingy in the ignition switch which sometimes gets a bit discombobulated, and if you strike the key with a hammer, jamming it all the way in, it'll allow you to turn the switch. Unfortunately, this is a temporary solution, and you are left with three choices when you implement it.

1. Take the car immediately for service (but not to the dealer, as they will replace with the same possibly hinky ignition switch tumbler set)
   
2. Leave the key in the car until you can get it serviced (that's the "Please steal my car" answer, I think)
3. Keep the hammer handy.

Amy's not got the time to handle this immediately, and clearly doesn't wish to leave the key in the car. Instead, she's going to use the "keep a hammer handy" method. At least, that's what she'll do when I return from Chicago. For now, she's driving mine.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you build a Chinese cluster fuck at 05:00. This trip simply HAS to get better from here.

Road trip!!!

So, the trip to Vegas was interesting. I was surprised with how spectacular the mesa country through Utah is... I would've stopped for pictures, but we were on a mission heading out to Vegas and figured we didn't want to make an eleven hour drive into something longer. We made great time, occasionally slipping over to the wrong side of 100mph. Zoom, zoom!

Once in Nevada, we got a quick reminder of how miserable it was when I lived there as a child. Oppressive doesn't come close to describing the heat that permeates the Las Vegas valley. I simply cannot describe the misery. Even if left under cover in a garage, every time I returned to the car, I felt as though somebody could be making pizza in there. I'm sure the black interior has something to do with that, but... Wow. It was effing hot.

The reunion was great. I ran into somebody whose friendship I always enjoyed, but we'd lost track of each other many years ago. We've vowed to make a change there. I also ran into a lady whom I didn't believe even knew I existed in high school. When she saw who I was, she yelped with joy at seeing me again. That was quite the surprise. Lots of memories were rehashed, and the twenty four years between graduation in 1985 and today were put into tidy little synopses as we got caught up.

I spent little time in the casinos, as I hate throwing money away. I did, however, make a 110% return on my blackjack investment dollar (I only put $50 on the table, and came back with $55 in profits). I then promptly turned around and spent the $55 on presents for my children.

Sadly, the trip home was not nearly as fun as the time in Vegas or the trip out. While we made great time through the deserts of Nevada and Arizona (again at times winding up on the wrong side of 100mph... damn, I love my Mustang), and flew through the mesa country in Utah, things got ugly in Colorado. Shortly after passing Grand Junction, 70 was closed and we had to go off the highway to try and find our way past what turned out to be a truck fire. Thankfully, the GPS does wonderful things with that. Sadly, that was just the beginning.

Around mile marker 150, traffic came to a dead halt... and I mean DEAD halt. We sat in the same spot for 45 minutes, and I wound up reading in a magazine waiting for it to move. Over the next two hours, we moved about a quarter of a mile. Fortunately, that quarter of a mile was just enough to get us to one of those "No U turn except..." spots. Yeah, I made an exception for red Mustangs, too. I flipped around and got on US 6 in the hope that it would improve. Ha! I learned that there was an overturned truck on I-70, and that was shunting all traffic off a horrifyingly packed 70 and onto a now hopelessly overloaded US 6.

To add insult to injury, once we got past the mess, I got stopped by a Colorado State Trooper. I rolled down the window and asked "Is there a problem, Trooper?" He said that while I was driving a good speed, I was weaving some and asked would I like to offer an explanation. Politely, I said "Yes, I left Las Vegas at 7am, and just spent the last five hours trying to get from Gypsum to Vail, with little success." He decided that I was sober (good thing, as I'd not had a drop since Saturday night's beer whilst playing blackjack), but suggested that I drive carefully.

I'm home, now... with the woman I love. Unfortunately, it's a short stay, as I'm off to Chicago for work. Whee!