The Joy of Serving

Hi Friends and Family: 

Well, although we should be well on our way to Amsterdam by now, instead we are stuck in beautiful downtown Seattle!  A Holiday Inn near Sea-Tac airport to be exact.

We rode up here with Allison and Mary Alice, stopping for breakfast in Olympia along the way, and arrived at the airport with the required two hours to spare.  We quickly unloaded our baggage along the curb, said our goodbyes, and wheeled everything inside to get out of the cold.  Then for about the next hour we were herded along through all the “zigzags”, slowly working our way up to the check in desk.  It’s such a hastle keeping everything together as you maneuver through all the turns pulling 5 suitcases behind you while trying to keep straps from your camera or laptop from dropping off your shoulder.  But through it all you look forward to your arrival at the front of the line where most of your load is finally dumped on the airline worker as you check them in.  Then you are FREE.  You no longer have to be concerned about most of your burden until your arrival at your destination-right?  Wrong!

I should have known something was up when the self-check-in screen told me something on the order of,”see attendant”.  Sharon and I both tried it but it was stubborn and replied with the same message for both of us.  So we hailed an attendant who wasn’t busy when we could find one.  She also came out and tried it.  She could do no better and so took our passports and went over to a computer where, for the next 30 minutes we seemingly stood in everybody else’s way while she tried to get us checked in the manual way (I suppose).

When something like this happens I believe the worst thing you can do is to watch the attendant’s facial expressions for encouragement as the minutes slowly roll by .  So, of course, that’s exactly what we did.  And we saw squints, eyebrow raises, sighs, lip-biting and, the worst, head-shaking.  What seemed to be completely lacking though, were the smiles.

Well, we found out at long last why this all was when she walked back over to us and said sympathetically, “Mr. Monson, your flight has been re-booked for tomorrow”  What!!  (I did say that somewhat loudly).  “Yes”, and she went on to explain that the flight from Amsterdam to Hyderabad was cancelled and so they re-booked us.  “They should have told you” she added unnecessarily.

Well to wrap this all up, no amount of pleading with them to “do something” changed anything and so here we are.  We hauled our burdens back out to the parking area and called for a shuttle bus from Holiday Inn to come and pick us up.  When we show up tomorrow I hope things will go better.  Please pray for us that it does.

God Bless,

Mike and Sharon

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Mission/Ministry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.