The trip gets off to a sordid start when, after one hour of lining up, we are greeted by the excellent news that – due to their mistake of overbooking the flight by 10% -- one of our party of four would suddenly not be accommodated on the plane. The mishap slowly escalates into a disaster as the clock ticks on, and the plane finishes boarding its passengers – minus ourselves.
Our poor friend who unexpectedly does not have a seat on the plane must wait to get his luggage back, and the waiting is arduous as the crew members attempt to locate one bag out of several hundred that they are not familiar with.
Already it is 7.20pm, the time our flight was supposed to take off. All the passengers are already on board, and the P. A. system incessantly asks us to board the plane already, as if the airline were not aware of the catastrophe they had gotten us into.
How could we possibly board the plane, when one ticket which our group paid for was to suddenly not be accommodated on the flight?
Oh, the injustice of it all.
With any luck, we were going to get through this mess, but not until those airplane guys found our friend’s luggage, so he could at least spend a decent night in Manila waiting for the next flight to Davao (which was, gasp, at dawn).
Wait and wait and wait we must. And as we inadvertently become the plane’s ultimate cause of delay (and this not by our own faults, hence the injustice of it all), we already know, as we pace around the check-in counter, that the other passengers are already seething inside and quietly hating us.
When we finally board the plane, they were going to be shooting invisible daggers at us, I just knew it.
