why did my mom just do your job, united airlines?

As those of you who are friends with me in real life or even e-friends with me on Facebook or Twitter know, I'm not supposed to be blogging today. Nope. I'm supposed to be at Foxwoods doubling, nay, trebling my unemployment welfare cash at the craps table. However, thanks to a huge string of storms and a bunch of incompetence, my flight got canceled.

Actually, let me be a little more specific. My flight never even arrived to the airport. The plane was supposed to come in from Newark (ew, I know), but eventually that flight got canceled which, more importantly, led to my flight being canceled.

But of course, it'd have been nice if the United gate workers told us this. Instead, it was my mom who called and let me know. Did I mention this was all going down on a Saturday around midnight and we'd already been sitting there waiting for two hours longer than originally planned probably catching swine flu multiple times? We weren't exactly a crowd to be f*cked with. If the flight was canceled, we wanted to know.

So, being the go-getter and huge bitch that I am, I ended up sashaying (yes, sashaying) over to the counter and informing the employees.

"Excuse me. I think the flight's been canceled."

"Hmm...are you sure?"

"I don't know. Isn't that your job?"

"How did you find out."

"My mom called. She found out from the Internet."

At this point the worker called a coworker over. Some calls were made, some keyboards were typed on and voila! An announcement was made. Flight 7986 had, indeed, been canceled.

Why I found this out sooner than the gate workers I will never know (my mom should make that kind of minimum wage), but when it comes to air travel in this country, I'm hardly surprised. I remember when traveling used to be fun. A time when you didn't have to argue about the size of your travel bottles; when you didn't have to risk catching a foot fungus by removing your shoes; when you could actually board your planes without sitting around getting angry for hours before; when your plane could actually take off and when it didn't you got a bunch of free stuff to assuage your inconvenience.

Now, though, there's nary a thing more I hate than air travel, especially when it's not even guaranteed that I will get to leave this sh*thole of a city (which is the trump card that usually negates all the aforementioned annoyingness of air travel). Instead, I got to waste $60 on SuperShuttles to and from Dulles and a whole lot of time I could have spent playing MarioKart on my best friend's newly procured Wii (my Saturday nights are ragers).

On the bright side, at least I didn't have to sleep in the airport, like most of the other travelers had to do. It smelled like dirty socks in there. But that's another story.

Happy Monday. At least you're not me!