#55 Airport Fiasco

This posting is to serve as a reminder and an example to all travelers to pay attention to what flight you’re supposed to be on. (What is the saying? "If I can't be a good example, at least I can serve as a warning to others.") I flew to Virginia last week for work and knew that my connecting cities were different coming and going. I failed to pay attention to what city I was flying to on which day. How did this happen? Well, I went to the correct gate. My flight was to leave at 6 a.m. Around 5:30 they called for a flight to Dulles. My two connecting cities were Chicago and Dulles. I gave the guy my boarding pass and it didn’t scan. He tried it a couple more times with no success so he tore it apart and I boarded the plane. I thought nothing of it until the plane landed in Dulles. I looked at my other boarding pass and it listed a departure time from CHICAGO at 7:20 a.m. It was currently around 7:30 a.m. I didn’t panic – I was fairly close to Virginia after all – and was able to get another flight to my destination. The bummer was I had to wait 4 hours in Dulles for the next flight. This was totally my fault, but how can an airline let someone get on the wrong flight? And what are the odds that the two cities I was flying to on different days had flights that left from the same gate at almost the same time? Oh well. For some reason I wasn’t supposed to go to Chicago.