Southwest Airlines Flight 7 leaves Lubbock at 6:55 a.m. and stops in Dallas before flying on to Houston. Its 9:30 arrival at Houston Hobby Airport makes same-day appointments at MD Anderson feasible. But today something unusual happened on the way to Houston.<\/p>\n
The flight leaving Lubbock was oversold, so the automated voicemail I received from Southwest at first seemed to be a consequence of that circumstance. \u00a0I became aware of the voicemail shortly after I turned my phone back on after landing in Dallas. The message said that portions of my flight had been canceled, and suggested that I might want to call Southwest to get details<\/p>\n
Now that seemed strange, because there I was sitting on the plane, in Dallas. The flight attendant had just announced that passengers continuing on to Houston should remain seated until the crew had counted noses. So I wondered, was this a ploy to deflect people from and oversold flight? Was it a message I should have had before I left Lubbock?<\/p>\n
So there we sat on the taxiway while I pondered the message. Just as we pulled to the gate, the announcement came that there had been a change in aircraft for those going to Houston. We were supposed to check in at Gate 6.<\/p>\n
There was a long line at Gate 6. The board at the gate \u00a0said the Houston flight, Flight 9, would be leaving at 9 a.m. \u00a0The gate attendant asked if I had a boarding pass. I repeated I had just come in from Lubbock and that they had taken the boarding pass in Lubbock. She looked incredulous. I said “Flight 7.” After she did something on her computer, she told me to talk to the agents at Gate 8.<\/p>\n
I was beginning to worry about my first (11 a.m.) appointment at MD Anderson as I stood in line at Gate 8. There I received a boarding pass – position B51 – for Flight 9, back at Gate 6. Now it was 8:30 a.m. As I took a seat at Gate 6, I soon realized there was no plane at the gate. The plane arrived at 8:45, and I thought, “now we’ll see if Southwest can turn this thing around in 10 minutes. \u00a0They did.<\/p>\n
Plane arrived in Houston right at 10. At 10:08 I was putting my bags in a taxi. At 10:11 we were leaving the airport. I told my driver the dilemma. He said he could have us at the Medial Center at 10:35. He beat that by 2 minutes; I dumped my bags at the hotel and got to my first appointment at 11 a.m. \u00a0It’s now 7:39 and I am waiting for my last procedure.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Southwest Airlines Flight 7 leaves Lubbock at 6:55 a.m. and stops in Dallas before flying on to Houston. Its 9:30 arrival at Houston Hobby Airport makes same-day appointments at MD Anderson feasible. But today something unusual happened on the way to Houston. The flight leaving Lubbock was oversold, so the automated voicemail I received from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1101","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-musings","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1101"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41039,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions\/41039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddickfamily.org\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}