The Adventures of Jessica Sideways

In July of 2009 when I went over to Thailand for my sex reassignment surgery, I flew to Bangkok on Delta/Northwest Airlines simply because it was the least expensive fare available. Well, even though many of my wounds are healing from surgery and much of the swelling has gone down, I felt that given my sudden memory of the post I made about my horrific experience with US Airways on New Year’s Day, I should let you know how it went with Delta/Northwest. This article does include some other information, including information about the airports I went through (Indianapolis, Atlanta, Tokyo, Bangkok, Detroit) during my flight, as well as reflections on my first transpacific flight ever. This includes personal reflections and reviews about the staff at all connections, reflections on the disparity of service between first class customers and coach passengers, like myself. It even includes admonishments of the airport staff at a number of the airports, including the people who pushed me around in my wheelchair. This post is a little long, even by my standards (it is about 3,300 words at the time of publication) and it is an artifact of my sex reassignment surgery journey that I did not yet talk about.

My trip started in Indianapolis, simply due to the fact that I had stayed with my Aunty in Southern Indiana, preparing physically, mentally and legally to take the trip to Bangkok, Thailand. Once I got my passport in the mail, we celebrated, she got me drinking a bit and even introduced me to my new favourite alcoholic beverage, the Applebees Mud Slide¹, which can get me buzzed with just two big glasses of that super-yummy elixir of life. But after a whole night of preparation and packing and briefing, we made the 50 mile journey to the Indianapolis airport. My very first impression of Delta came with the long-ass line at the ticket counter and the boarding pass kiosks were not working (I tried swiping the data page of my passport at the kiosk like it said to do and it was not accepting my data, even though I checked in online and gave the website my passport number, name and other data). They set up the kiosk so that there was only one big line but then, they split the line into two sections and then roped the section that I was in off, so naturally, I am starting off pissed at them. Eventually, we cut in front of this one couple and we eventually got my bags tagged and checked in and I was making my way through security and onto the plane. After a big hug and warm fuzzies were shared, it was time for me to make my way towards the plane. The flight from Indianapolis to Atlanta was not too bad, it was just one of those boring, uneventful things that went pretty well. No real things to complain about, although I did get to talk to a real Delta stewardess who was sitting across the row from me (I was on a “Delta Connection” flight, which is run by – another airline).

When I landed in Atlanta’s airport, I have to tell you that it was an exercise in one’s stress management abilities, that was for sure! I landed in Concourse C (I think) and I needed to get over to Concourse T (the International Concourse) so I could get to my flight from Atlanta to Tokyo-Narita. I will talk about how stupid it is to have a flight going to Tokyo from Atlanta later, but first, let’s get to the proper concourse, shall we? The Atlanta airport train system was frustrating as hell and I got off on the wrong stop because of the fact that I was not able to correctly ascertain where the hell I was going in the airport. I go up the stairs and find out that I am just in the next concourse over, so I decide to stop and get something to read on the long-ass flight I am about to take (I pick up a copy of He’s Just Not that Into You from the airport bookstore and pay through the nose for it – ironically though, the plane is showing the same movie on the screens) and head down the stairs back to the train/walkway to hopefully find my way to the International concourse. I find another flight of stairs and I take it up, only to find out I am in the same fucking concourse so I head right back down the stairs and wait for the train heading towards the proper concourse to come by. It did and I did not get off until I saw my concourses name on at least a few pieces of signage. Atlanta’s airport is fucking confusing as hell, let’s just put it that way, shall we? It makes me worry that Denver’s airport is modelled after the Atlanta airport…

Now that I am in the proper concourse, I try to find my flight and luckily enough, I find it – it is near the food court, I can run to the bathroom and get a bite to eat before my eternally long-ass flight. So, I go to the little girl’s room and do my thing and once I get out, I go and get a slice of yummy, greasy cheese pizza from the food court and really enjoy myself. I would have indulged myself at TGI Fridays with a bit of liquor and a nicer sit down meal but I did not think that given such an important leg of my flight, that it was a good idea to chance missing my flight. Then I notice something that scared me right down to the bone – I misplaced my boarding pass somewhere! I walked up to the Delta counter to tell them what happened, that I had misplaced my boarding pass. That, and the fact that I did not know what gate my flight from Tokyo-Narita to Bangkok Subvarnabhumi aiport was. Out of all the counters they have at the Delta counter and all the staff members they COULD have helping people, there were only two people working the counters that day and it took them seemingly forever to get me a boarding pass for a flight that I was so scared that was about to leave me. They also had a line for “First Class/Business First” clients and a lady working that counter, doing nothing, sitting around and twiddling her thumbs. Shows me how much Delta values it’s customers.

Once I got my boarding pass, I meandered back towards the flight to Tokyo-Narita and it was a little while before they started calling zones to board the plane. I will tell you right now, the queue to board the fucking plane was about 30 feet long, from what I could see and they had another queue position that they could open up but it was reserved for first class patrons. That pissed me off to no end as they made me and all of the other passengers who cannot afford to fly first class wait in one of the longest queues I have seen, outside of that one time that I waited in a queue for Mac OS X Leopard to be released. Eventually, we got boarded onto the plane and got packed into the plane like a can of so much sardines. I guess I cannot bitch too much about this because of the fact that this was my first transpacific flight ever and I simply did not have the money nor the leave of common sense to pay the very high premium for first class airfare and thus, delay my surgery another semester or two. So, I prepared to suffer through my eventual long-ass flight from Atlanta’s airport to Tokyo-Narita, confident that something was going to go wrong and hopeful that the next time I step through the bulkhead doors of this plane, I will be on the other side of the globe.

Now, it is time to talk about how retarded it is to send a flight to Tokyo-Narita from Atlanta, on the East Coast of the United States. Firstly, even though I was already in Indianapolis and on the East Coast, my connection flight drove me further east before we even began to head West. I wonder what Delta would have me do if I were to fly from Denver to Bangkok, but I digress. But essentially, what happens when the flight to Tokyo takes place is that the plane has to cover a lot more area and travel a much further distance then if it were to fly from a West Coast airport like Los Angeles (LAX), San Francisco, Vancouver, Portland or Seattle/Tacoma. This, in and of itself is already a major waste of fuel simply because it has to travel across the United States before heading towards Tokyo-Narita. Furthermore, you have to keep passengers calm, reasonably happy and hopefully get them there in a much speedier time, especially since those of us unlucky enough to be stuck away in Coach do not have the privilege to lie down and go to sleep unlike those lucky bastards from first class get to do. This is much harder to do if we have to spend much more time in an airplane than we would if you would have taken off from an airport much closer to our intended destination. Just sayin’.

Let me tell you something I have found out about airline food in regards to transpacific flights, it is not really that bad! Not considering all of the horror stories I hear, what I had to eat was actually palatable and did not taste like it was a direct descendant of the cardboard that it most assuredly came from. I am not saying that it was perfect but it was not downright nasty either and some of it was actually fairly tasty, which is odd given all of the things that one has heard about airline food. One thing I will say though is that the planes need to adopt the individualized entertainment system that the smaller planes (like the one from Tokyo to Bangkok) have simply because of the fact that it is a much longer flight from Atlanta to Tokyo (or from anywhere in the US/Canada to Tokyo for that matter). I was able to entertain myself much better on the flight from Tokyo-Bangkok and from Bangkok-Tokyo than I was on the flights from Atlanta-Tokyo and Tokyo-Detroit and I can only read Shanghai Tango so many times before I go stark raving mad. However, I did make a facebook friend from one of my seatmates on the Tokyo-Detroit leg of my flight so I am pretty happy about that.

Once we landed in Tokyo, I was eager to get up, stretch my legs, run around a little bit and get to the next gate so I could make sure that I would get my flight (and to see if I could get a nap in the airport before takeoff). In Tokyo, you do not have to leave the secured area to get to your next flight, although you do have to go through security again, it is not as bad as having to go through Passport control, customs and then security again. After a seemingly long run with a lot of twisty, turny hallway and moving sidewalk to cover, I eventually reached security and got cleared to continue on to my flight. Of course, seeing as I was in Japan, I did stop off at a shop to get a couple of boxes of dessert pocky and head on to the plane (I did not eat them on the plane, mind you, I saved them for while I was in Bangkok). Here at the Tokyo-Narita airport, I saw the all too familiar two lines, one for preferred customers and the other for the coach peons like us. I queued up the first chance I got and when I got on the plane, I met an expat who lives in Bangkok. On this leg of my flight, they did get my request for a soft meal/liquid diet but by this time, it was already too late.

My return trip was worse than the trip to Bangkok, as I got off to a bad start – being unable to get any sort of sleep at all due to packing my bags at the very last minute to trying to make sure that I stay up so I do not oversleep and miss my ride to the airport and thusly, my flight. Therefore, after the limousine (it was not a real limo but a fancy car that was run by a service referring to themselves as a limousine service) dropped me off just a few doors down from my gate, I meandered my way over to the long-ass line at the NWA counter. I let them know I had surgery (they asked why I was carrying my invalid ring) and offered me a wheelchair and thought that I could use a rest so I gladly accepted. NWA had a hell of a time sorting out my boarding pass and everything that needed to be sorted out, so I waited patiently in my chair as they did all the computer voodoo that they needed to do. They took my baggage away and soon, I was being wheeled off towards passport control so I could get my exit stamp (first one I ever received in my entire life, oddly enough) and head towards the gate that I needed to get to. Once I cleared security, I saw how dull it was past that point, after I passed all of the duty-free shops and restaurants, there was virtually nothing after the security checkpoint. Then it was time to wait, and wait, and wait until we were allowed to go down to the floor where we could board the plane at and my passport was checked and all that fun stuff. The last thing I noticed about Bangkok’s airport was that Delta did not apparently have a special queue for Delta’s first class customers, it only had one line that you could board the airplane at. I did not know whether or not they just boarded the first class people first or what, but it did make me smile a bit that Bangkok’s airport probably did not allow Delta to do that kind of bullshit in their airport.

On the flight from Bangkok to Tokyo, I got seated next to a businessman who lives in Bangkok for 10 months out of the year and I got to talk with him about my sex change, how he got to live in Bangkok for so long, teaching English and a few other things of minute interest. I eventually tired of conversation and returned to the in-seat entertainment system which allowed me to play Bejeweled and watch a couple of movies (I think I watched Milk either on the trip to Bangkok or on the trip back, I cannot remember). Except for the fact that one of the flight attendants called me “sir”, which really offended me and got me to talk with the purser who corrected him, the trip was pretty uneventful. The lady who had my wheelchair waiting at the Tokyo airport was running fast since we had to make my connection and we even went to a security lane which was promised to go much faster than the one upstairs in the International Corridor. We eventually made it safely to the gate, where I made my way to my seat and then we took off. I cannot say much about my flight on the trip from Tokyo to Detroit because it was just as uneventful as the trip from Atlanta to Tokyo. Then, when we finally landed in Detroit, it was the adventures of the incompetent wheelchair handler from Michigan.

Basically, this guy was waiting for me as I was one of the last people to de-board the plane in Detroit simply because I needed a wheel chair. Once I got my chair though, I was zooming towards immigration control and I can tell you right now, I was so glad that I was in a wheelchair when it was time for me to go through immigration. The line for US Citizens at that side of immigration was huge, but the wheelchair guy pulled me towards a special line which allowed me to clear immigration much faster than all of the other shmucks who had their legs. However, once we cleared immigration, the guy disappeared so I had to take things into my own hands. Essentially, I had to wheel myself to the baggage carousel, lift my heavy ass luggage off of the carousel and then, wheel myself into the queue for customs. Eventually, Mr. Special Ed did return and he helped me clear Customs much faster than the normal people and we were zooming towards TSA after I picked up a new boarding pass over at the NWA counter. Of course, I was to find out that the boarding pass I picked up would soon be worth less than the paper it was printed on.

Once we got to the terminal, he basically parked me next to the people hawking Delta SkyMiles American Express credit cards. Being one who is never too shy to take advantage of an opportunity to get a second-rate credit card, I signed up for one (and I was later declined simply due to my bad credit) and decided that the wheelchair dude was not coming back. So, armed with this knowledge, I started to wheel myself towards the gate that was printed on my boarding pass, only to find out from the gate agent that the plane had moved to another gate on the other side of the airport. I wheeled myself towards that gate and eventually boarded that plane only to find out one thing – the crew essentially became illegal while we were waiting to take off. So, we had to wait an inordinate amount of time while they called over another wheelchair and pusher to the plane (about 30-45 minutes) and the flight attendants even gave me some of the first class goodies given my troubles and the long wait I had to suffer because of the circumstances. Eventually, I was pushed by this nice girl (who was very interesting to talk to, by the way) to the new gate and even though I was not given a new boarding pass, I was eventually allowed to board the plane. However, the gate agent decided to push my chair into the breezeway and then closed the gate, without even helping me down the breezeway. Once I maneuvered my chair down the breezeway, I eventually boarded the final plane that would take me home. Nothing to say about this trip other than the fact that the old man heading the same way was kinda cute.

So, in conclusion, I do not think that my experience with Delta/Northwest Airlines was all bad, per se, and it certainly was not as bad as my experience with US Airways on New Years Day. However, I do have to say that I am not left with much confidence in Delta/NWA and I would have to say that Southwest Airlines definitely gets all of my business in regards to domestic travel. But, I have no qualms that would make me avoid them when I go back to Thailand with my beloved Samara for her SRS/Breast Augmentation and my revision/breast augmentation surgery. I have no real complaints that were not addressed by the staff, other than the bullshit that happened in Detroit’s airport. I was glad I was flying Southwest on my trip back home after my stay with my Aunt, who helped me immensely with planning everything, getting the airline tickets and coordinating with my doctor. However, if Samara & I get the opportunity for our trip to Thailand to take Business class, we will take it since I would like to get a little shut eye on the plane and I am afraid that I can only do it while I am horizontal.

Footnotes

1. The link is for a copy-cat recipe, you can find out more about the original on the Applebees’ website. [↩]

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