#6. American Airlines' IQ

Two days and two changes to the schedule. I originally had a doozy planned for today; hell, I have it written already (a.k.a. what will become Saturday's entry when I'm too lazy to write one tomorrow night). But still, this was more topical.

So, this morning, I was set to fly out of an airport into another airport, but first I had to land and switch planes in another airport, well, second, because first I had to get to that second airport.

Anyway, moving on, I was set to fly on a very bad airline, let's just say it rhymes with Jamerican. And that airline altered the flight schedule without telling me so that my 70 minute layover would be just 40 minutes. Then the flight was delayed coming in because of inclement weather elsewhere, a decision that was made at 7:00 am eastern time when that flight out of Boston did not take off, taking off of course being necessary for that plane to arrive in my airport so I could leave it. Of course, when I looked at 10:00 am central time, Jamerican Airlines still told me my flight was on time. Liars.

And yet, I took it in stride, because this was, after all, Jamerican Airlines.

The same airline that overbooked my flight out of Denver on Christmas and offered me $500 to switch to a different flight, a flight that I would never have been on had Jamerican allowed me to pay anything less than $1,437.85 to switch my flight to one out of Vail. That flight out of Vail, in case you were wondering, had 73 free seats, also known as not overbooked.

The same airline that would not let me use any of my 82,000 miles to upgrade to first class when there were four empty seats in first class to alleviate the problem of the flight being overbooked, then threw four random stand-by shmucks into first class after a 20 minute delay to find someone to surrender his seat.

The same airline that, after I missed my connection because of their stupidity, would not let me alter my plans to fly into another airport when the one they rebooked me into was, guess what, overbooked, and the one I wanted to fly into, guess what, had 17 free seats.

Now, of course, there are worse airlines. Take Spirit Airlines, for instance, which got its name from the belief that if you fly it, that's what you'll become mid-flight. or U.S. Airways, which offered such bad customer service that it got taken over by American West, winner of the “Worst Airline Award” by Forbes nine times in ten years from 1993 to 2002, before the takeover. And, of course, AirCanada, which services Canada.

But the airline that rhymes with Jamerican is right up there, and in terms of dumbest airlines, it's top-notch.

The website is a clusterfuck of clusterfuckable objects. In order to find out how to check-in online, you have to go to a page that tells you that you need to go back to the home page. In order to find the telephone number to call customer service, you have to do a google search. In order to book a flight, you really need to go to a different airline.

This picture defies comment.

When you get to the airport, you either need your account number or the confirmation number to check-in without waiting in line. While every other airline lets you either scan a credit card or enter your email address or pick your own account number so it's something that you actually know, Jamerican choses to be different. So I had to go stand in line.

And if you make it onto the plane, which I did not, more on which later, you better not expect anything glamorous. You have to pay $3 for headphones, or infinity times the amount you have to pay on jetBlue and 300 times the amount on Continental or Delta, both of which offer earbuds, a feature that, unlike Jamerican's bulky overhead ones, has been invented since 1726. You get a little bag of mixed nuts, a.k.a. 98% peanuts, which aren't actually nuts, and don't even think about asking for a second bag. Finally, you can't get iced tea, because the woman just looks at you funny when you ask for a glass of ice, hot water, and a tea bag.

Legumes, not nuts, although they're just as salty.

Anyway, I did not get on the Jamerican plane today because Jamerican found a way to actually get me to Cleveland (damnit, now you know my whereabouts): by putting me on Continental. It was my best Jamerican experience in years.