Have I met your travel needs?

I guess I'm about to add my voice to the now commonplace complaints about air travel.

How unoriginal.

At 10:30 pm on Monday, July 30, 2007, I got an automated call on my cell phone informing me that my 7 am flight the next morning had been cancelled. United's automated attendant proceeded to rattle off new flight information which I was totally unprepared to take down.

This was complicated by the fact that one of my two fellow travelers was calling, first on my cell and then on my home phone, so the automated attendant was being interrupted by various beeps and clicks.

There were three of us traveling but our itineraries weren't linked due to differing returns. One was notified and rebooked. One was simply notified and left to fend for herself. The third was not even notified.

So, I called United for all three of us. Such fun.

The first time, as soon as the thickly accented attendant realized how complicated our situation was, she promptly disconnected me. Nice punt.

I called back. 67 minutes later, all three of us were rebooked together, scheduled to arrive in Chicago at 6 pm instead of 2 pm and stopping twice in Denver and Minneapolis instead of once in Denver. There were multiple flights that would have gotten us to Denver to make our original connection (we had a long layover in Denver) but she wouldn't/couldn't put three of us on any of them.

At the end of the call, "Maria" asked me if she had met my travel needs. I said no. She asked again. I said no again. When she asked a third time, I replied that I was sorry but I was not going to be able to answer in the affirmative. I understood that she had done the best that she could but the answer to the question was still, "Not really."

She didn't ask again.