Crazy Days of Christmas

So as this week comes to an end I can honestly say that I am soooo happy it is finally over. I was so glad to go home for Christmas this year, it had been 4 years since I was able to celebrate this holiday at home (aka my mom and dad's house) with my family. The first part of the week was not at all what I had hoped for. I start my work week on Saturday afternoon so that is where I will start my story.

Last Saturday it seemed as though it would be a pretty normal day at the airport. My Mom was trying to get home from Texas which was proving to be more of a challenge than we had thought but it was working. She arrived in Boise around 1030 that morning so I picked her up and brought her back to my house to rest for a little while since she had spent the night in the Seattle airport I knew she would like a nap and shower. Besides Seattle is the coldest airport in the world in the middle of the night, we learned this a few years ago on our way home from Alaska.

So anyways, I dropped her off and headed back to start my shift at 12pm that day. I clocked in and went about the first part of my day without any major events. It was trying to snow but it wasn't anything to get excited about. I picked Mom up at 4pm and brought her back to the airport, I was scheduled to work until 8pm that day. She had a flight at 940pm back to Idaho Falls so she decided to just spend the afternoon at the airport reading. So around 5 that evening is when the holiday season turned into something that I will never forget as long as I live. Seattle and Portland we forecast for freezing rain... what does this mean, well it means that we still had 8 flights that were scheduled to leave that night and only if I remember right 3 of them did, Mom's was one of them. Well while they were canceling flights for the rest of the night I was rebooking passengers that were getting more and more upset that due to this horrible weather in the Pacific Northwest their holiday travel was being interrupted. I got off work that night at 230am... after 3 Alaska 737 aircraft came to Boise to get more fuel to try to land in Seattle, one from Kona HI, one from Newark NJ, and one from Cancun MX.

I returned to work the following morning at 715am with about 2 hours of sleep and very little patience for what the day held for me. That Sunday of the 20 flights that our airline was suppose to operate out of Boise we sent 3 or 4. We spent the entire day rebooking people for the next day hoping that things would get better overnight. Well they didn't and on Monday I returned to work again to spend the entire day rebooking passengers. By this time I was on a first name basis with about 200 people that had been trying to get out of Boise now for 3 days to no avail. Tuesday was more of the same although we did send more flights that day we got several phone calls telling us not to send anyone to Portland or Seattle if they had connecting flights to anywhere else in our system. Because Portland and Seattle had felt the worst of the displaced angry passengers they had thousands of people they were trying to move. At one point there was a 4 hour wait in Portland just to get a chance to speak face to face with and airline agent. Tuesday was the last day of my work week this week. I was headed home for Christmas and come freezing rain or not I was going to make it. And I did, Dad offered to drive round trip from Idaho Falls to Boise that day to pick me up, but I decided that I would take my chances with the flight and see what came of it. Well come 940pm that day when I should have been climbing onto and airplane for a short 45 min. flight home, I was climbing onto a bus to transport me across that state. I got into Idaho Falls as 130am where Dad picked me up and took to me home. I got sick, some kind of upper respiratory crap, I am sure I got it from one of the hundreds of boarding passes I handled in the 4 days I spent telling the same passengers over and over again how sorry I was that the weather in Seattle and Portland was so bad and that we would get them there as soon as we could. In those 4 days at work I put in approx 49 hours give or take a few. We had great support from our leadership at the airport, they brought in food when we needed it and they tried to make sure that each of us had the chance to sit down and eat at least once a day. I know that I did not put in any more hours than at least 4 of my coworkers. My hat goes off to the people in Seattle and Portland that dealt with the same thing on a much larger scale. As a company things like this really show our true colors and the fact that most of our passengers still had smiles on their faces as they were finally boarding flights to various destinations makes me proud to be a member of the team. We are doing something right.

I spent 3 days at Mom and Dad's house. It was a great mini-vacation, I got to go sledding with my niece and nephews and we had a great holiday together. So I came home to Boise today, where we got 6 inches of new snow and dealt with more delayed flights. I have a feeling that last weekend was the worst of the winter weather but it is far from over. I have never worked so many hours and been on my feet for so long, and still felt so useless. No matter what I did, those people were not going to get where they wanted to be in time for the holiday. At work today I saw several of them just now getting to board a flight that they should have been on a week ago.

So as this holiday season in upon us, for those of us that were lucky enough to spend it the people that we love I hope that we can remember all of those that did not have that chance. Because of things that were out of their control. For the soldiers over seas and for the families that suffered loss this year or in the years past. We are truly blessed when we can be surrounded by our loved ones during this season.