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more travel delays

Filed under: travel — March 18, 2005

I guess I’m O and 3 now. I posted about my 38-hour trip home last month, but I seem to be on a roll here. Last week a snow/ice storm in Boston shut the airport down, and this week, a mechanical problem meant that we had to de-board and wait for a replacement plane. I got home around 1 am.

A stewardesses on the flight was complaining about the situation to some of the passengers. She’d been with the airline for almost 15 years and thought that they were really going down-hill. She claimed the reason it would take a while for them to resolve the mechanical issue is that they didn’t have enough ground staff. According to her, the budget-airlines were undercutting American so much that American couldn’t afford to operate. The ground staff that hadn’t been laid off were being employed under multi-year, minimum-wage contracts with no benefits. “Is this really how we want to treat people?” she asked. Sure, airline ticket prices are a bit lower, but at what cost?

Given my recent track record, I’m now expecting a long-haul heading home from PyCon.

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