So on top of all this garbage, there were two drunk men sitting across from me, being very obnoxious. One of them started to make fun of a woman a few rows up, in the aisle, who was being comforted by a flight attendant, as she was visibly having some sort of anxiety episode. Feeling like an employee working for a Niagara Tree Trimming Company, I turned to them and told them that they were being really insensitive and that they needed to stop. My poor friend was trying to get me to stop, worrying what the intoxicated men might do, but they just mocked me a little, and nothing else really came of it. They did stop, though. Point for me.

So after this nightmare, we finally get up in the air, and the captain comes on the announcement system and says “hey folks, I’m afraid I have some bad news.” First of all, even if everything up until now had been completely by the book, and had gone absolutely smoothly, you STILL are NOT ALLOWED to say “I have some bad news” to a plane full of people when you’re cruising at an altitude of you’ll-die-if-we-crash. Luckily, the bad news was not “the engines are frozen and we’re going down,” rather that, due to the delays we had already experienced, it would be in breach of the flight attendants’ contract to have them work until we got to Manchester, because they’d already been on duty for however many hours. So that meant that we had to stop in Montreal for two hours while the crew was changed.

When we finally got to London, it was the middle of the night. We were supposed to have arrived at like 2pm, so …yeah, not thrilled. Because it was the middle of the night, there was no public transportation running, so we had to wait in line for another two hours at Gatwick to get transportation into the city.  Air Transat did pay for our transportation into the city, and rightly so, but I was supposed to have been in York that night, and I (obviously) had to stay at my friend’s place in London. So … long story long, I try not to fly with these guys anymore.

That said, I did feel super sorry for the flight attendants. It wasn’t their fault, and they had to take the brunt of the complaints.  That’s an important thing to think about when you’re flying, actually, that unless a flight attendant is actually rude to you, whatever you’re dealing with, whatever inconvenience that you’re experiencing, be it a delay or a lack of roasted peanuts or something, isn’t their fault. I seriously doubt that those flight attendants wanted to be stuck in that plane on the tarmac for all those hours anymore than the rest of us did. So be nice to your flight attendants!

Anyway, so that’s my story about Air Transat, in a rather large nutshell. And though you may be thinking man, if anything, that makes me want to fly even less than I did before I read that, think about it this way: even after that horrible experience and apparent complete disorganization, I made it to my destination.