BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

…just to be the man who ate a cheese-burr-gerrrrrrr.

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Okay… I know, I know… Enough with massacring the Proclaimer’s tune… They sing it way better than I do anyway.

So, I ran my mouth about my recent travel experience to and from Ohio, nothing new about that. I run my mouth all the time. But, there are a couple of other things I also did this go around.

The first is, I filled out the online questionnaire the airline kept harping about. Usually I don’t do that sort of stuff because I simply don’t have the time, but I figured what the hell.

Now here’s the thing. I did NOT piss and moan. Well, not much… After all, I had already written the 4 part blog about the trip and put the posts into the queue for deployment, so all of my pissing and moaning was pretty much finished. Anywho, to be honest I actually gave them a pretty good review. I even lauded praise upon a gate agent at Chicago O’Hare for her professional handling of a sticky situation with a young pilot who in my opinion was in need of an anger management class. I mean, adults generally don’t throw screaming fit temper tantrums when they don’t get their way – especially in front a terminal full of people… But then, maybe that’s just the way I see things, and we all know I see things differently than most…

But back to that online thing… When the questions got around to asking if I was delayed for more than 15 minutes on any particular flight/connection, I told the truth and said yes.

I honestly don’t know if it was my answers on the questionnaire, or something that the airline took it upon themselves to do simply because they are wonderful people. I’m inclined to believe it is option #1, but at any rate, I received the following in the mail:

Since Ms. Elizabeth Reed, General Manager of Customer Care for NWA was so kind as to send this, I figured that since I had pretty much blasted them – in my own tongue in cheek fashion, of course – via Brainpan Leakage, I should be fair about things and point out that they did in fact apologize, and even gave me an extra 1000 miles on my frequent flyer account.

That’s actually more than I can say for some of the other airlines I have flown.

Now I just need someplace to go. I wonder how far 1000 frequent flyer miles will get me? Of course, if I redeem them and the airplane has an auxiliary power unit malfunctioning, no air conditioning, and instead of sending someone to Sears for a DieHard battery the pilot bribes some guys in yellow vests and earmuffs to give us a jump, just as soon as they can find where they stashed the cables, I think I might have to scream.

But, not in front of a terminal full of people.

The second thing I did involved a hamburger… Well, a cheeseburger to be precise. As you well know, in the installment titled You Want Blonde Or Brunette On That, I took some more of my tongue in cheek pot shots – or in this case slapshots –  at the restaurant chain, Fuddruckers. I won’t go into euphemistic details about my experience there, after all I did just that in the aforementioned post.

The thing that triggered me doing the thing, so to speak – (hey, fancy word usage… that’s why I get paid the big bucks) – was the fact that so many of you took me to task… Well, actually only one of you took me to task (yes, you George) Still, a huge number of you either commented here, on Facebook, or even sent me a direct email to tell me how absolutely wonderful Fuddruckers truly is, and that my experience must have been an isolated incident. Y’all also went on to tell me that I should file a complaint with the corporate office.

Well, I ruminated on that a bit, and while it’s something I don’t normally do, I surfed on by Fuddruckers.com and found their feedback form. I sent them a comment letting them know about my experience, and that I was only doing such because several of my readers had urged me to do so.

Now they are mad at all of you…

Just kidding. Kinda.

But, seriously, within something around 36 hours I received an email from the corporate office, thanking me for the feedback and letting me know it had been forwarded on to the appropriate store. Less than 8 hours after that I received a very nice apology email from the manager of the store in question, and she is sending me a gift card.

I have to say that kind of integrity out of a company is pretty damned impressive. At least, to me it is, because that hasn’t always been my experience with some other chains. If you don’t know which one I’m talking about search my blog for “square hamburgers are evil” and see what you find.

So anyway, next time I’m on the road and have a layover while making a connection – I mean, you simply cannot fly anywhere these days without making a connection in some faraway place, we’ve already established that – I’ll be keeping my eye out for a Fuddruckers. I’m really looking forward to finally having that truly stellar hunk-o-seared-moo-cow on a bun that E K waxed droolific about so many years ago.

And yes, you too, George… 😉

More to come…

Murv

I’m sure some of you noticed recently that the header banner for Brainpan Leakage went through a bit of a change. At the time of this writing (which is not necessarily the time at which this entry will be deployed) it is back to normal. However, around the time I was heading for Ohio it had the addition of some little cartoon characters along with captions, as seen above. This was because here in Saint Louis we were in our 11th straight day of temperatures in the 95+ range combined with high humidity, which in turn created heat indexes in the 110+ range and extreme heat advisories throughout the area. Being an old fat guy, I wasn’t overly excited about the weather, but then, that is what air conditioning is for, correct?

Well, I suppose that all depends on who you ask, or in my case, which airplane you board.

Yes, imagine my dismay upon boarding the decrepit DC-9, only to discover that the auxiliary power unit was malfunctioning, which effectively left us sitting at the gate with no Air Conditioning and unable to start the engines. As we sat there sweltering in the convection oven of an airliner, the captain came on the loudspeaker and announced that we would not be obtaining a new all weather DieHard battery from Sears as one would expect. Seems he had managed to bribe some guys in yellow vests and earmuffs to give us a jump as soon as they managed to find where they stashed the cables.

Eventually, the “screaming metal death tube,” as my publicist insists on calling airplanes, was coughing and sputtering up the tarmac, and soon afterward we were winging our way toward Detroit Metro Airport (remember, I said we couldn’t get there from here and all that…) The rest of the flight was uneventful, more or less. The guy next to me spent the entire hour and 10 minutes reading page 72 of a Johnathan Kellerman novel while bobbling his head back and forth and making “skrrrzzznnnnxxx” noises. And of course there was Mister Chronic Halitosis, but we won’t go there.

Upon finally reaching Detroit, the “farthest terminal/gate statute” was invoked and I had to trudge something on the order of a mile plus to get to my connecting flight. Now one of of the things about DTW is that they apparently watched the original 1976 version of Logan’s Run several times and then dropped a couple of hits of LSD before they built it. At least, that’s my best guess. I say this because they have this elevated indoor bullet train looking thing which will take you from terminal to terminal if you don’t want to walk, and it is oddly reminiscent of the “shuttle tubes” from the movie. If that’s not enough, (and this is where the LSD had to have come in) there is also the Acid Trip Tunnel, pictured above. This underground passageway runs beneath the tarmac and between terminals. Just so you know, it actually looks like that photo. It’s dark, lit only by weirdly shifting, low-wattage, multi-colored lights behind patterned Plexiglas panels along the sides. And, just to make sure it is “Carousel-Like” (see Logan’s Run) there are speakers playing whale noises, electronic music, and other bizarre electro-whacky sounds. One would definitely want to avoid this area after spending a bit too much time in one of the lounges if you get my meaning.

So, anyway, I hoofed it to my connecting gate since I didn’t have much of a layover and arrived with plenty of time to spare. What I didn’t realize at that particular moment was that I had way more time to spare than I originally thought.

“Why is that?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you… (You knew I would…)

I had no more texted Heather of VFG (Violet Flame Gifts) to let her know I was on the ground in Detroit and that my next flight was running on time, than the gate agent flipped a switch and announced that there was a delay due to a crew member calling in sick and the standby replacement not answering the phone. Therefore, rather than leave in 30 minutes at 5:17 as scheduled, we would be departing at 7:11.

I immediately started looking around for a Slurpee machine, because it was somewhere around this point in time that I had an epiphany – It seemed that Northwest Airlines was now under the control of the Southland Corporation…

More to come…

Murv

Next Installment: You Want Blonde Or Brunette On That?