Jet Not So Blue

I mentioned at the end of one of my posts last Thursday that I was going to be in lovely Chicago for the weekend. Well.....guess which airline I was booked on.

None other than Jet Blue.

As you may have figured out already, just based on that last sentence alone, my wife and I never got to Chicago. Our flight on Thursday was canceled, and the earliest they could book us on anything else would have been Sunday, which was the day we were scheduled to fly back. So we didn't go at all.

Now there has been a lot of bad news in the press about Jet Blue's problems over the last week, and rightly so, considering today is the first day that they actually got back to actually flying their whole schedule, a whole six days after the Northeast snowstorm. It has been that long since they got more than two out of five daily flights from JFK to Chicago off the ground, and none of them on time. That's pretty damn bad.

But you know what? For us it was a blessing in disguise. We never got stuck at an airport waiting for a plane that would never come, we knew our flight got canceled before we left the apartment. So we didn't have that stress or the stress of being stuck somewhere trying to get home in time to go to a job or anything. We just didn't get to go to Chicago on a random weekend we had picked because it fit in to my wife's schedule. And after some schedule juggling, we found time two weeks later that we could go, and re-booked the whole thing. We're even staying a day longer.

Best thing about this? Well, there are several. First, instead of being in Chicago with a bunch of snow on the ground and the temperatures in the single digits, even worse with the wind chill, we now get to go on a weekend that is forecast to be in the upper 30s/low 40s. And the snow is even going to melt in the meantime.

Second, airports suck in general. Airports suck even more on the day after a major storm shuts them down and forces several hundred flight cancellations, and they are full of thousands of tired, cranky and often smelly people trying, for the second day in a row, to get on a plane. We got to skip all that.

Best of all, I got to book myself on an earlier flight so I could skip on down to downstate Illinois, where I went to college, so I could spend a night hanging out with one of my all-time favorite people in the world. A trip to see great old friends is even better when the list of who you are going to see is one person longer. So this worked out especially sweet for me.

I couldn't be happier.

Thanks Jet Blue. Pass me some blue potato chips and let's see if there is a West Wing marathon on the digital TV.