2 Texans Down Under

December 31 — My daughter, Lyn, dropped us off at DFW just after 6 p.m. yesterday, more than 12 hours ago, so we could catch an American Airlines flight to LA and then a Qantas flight to Brisbane, but I just called her and it was a local call.

We’re in a La Quinta motel in Arlington, near Six Flags over Texas, with our trip extended 24 hours courtesy of American. Brake repairs to the plane and a pilot calling in sick combined to produce a delay so long that we knew we’d miss our connection in LA.

Such stories are so common that they don’t merit blogging about, but the experience has produced a couple of conversations worth mentioning.

One was overheard. A crew chief confided in an AA clerk behind the counter while we were getting switched to tonight’s flight that a pilot was on hand to fill in for the sick captain. The brake problem had been fixed. We could have flown then and made our connection.

“Too late,” said the clerk, “we’ve already told people we’re leaving at 10 and they’re all over the airport now.” So, we could be almost home as I’m writing this, but we’re not.

The other conversation is one I had outside the terminal with a very tall man named Robert C. I’ll withhold his last name to protect the angry innocent. As we waited for the La Quinta shuttle to take us here to the motel, he was waiting for another bus and he was quietly raging.

Here’s his story. He and his wife had arrived from Mexico for a flight home to Philadelphia. At customs, he was detained so long that he missed his connection. At his insistence, his wife went on home without him.

At first, he said, the customs authorities wouldn’t even tell him why they’d taken him to a room off to the side and detained him. At least some of the time, he was alone and had to communicate with customs agents through small holes in what appeared to be a bullet-proof glass window.

Answers to his questions tended to be either “I don’t know” or “We have no authority to tell you that” or “We have no authority to do that.” At times during his two hours in detention, the clerk behind the window would get up and disappear into a back area when he approached the window.

Finally, he was told that “a person who has done some very bad things has your same name and birth date and we’re trying to catch him.”

“Would you please check his information,” Robert C. asked them, “to see if he is six feet, five inches tall?” The Robert C. I talked with appeared to be, as he claimed, six five.

Perhaps he should have cited the Biblical verse about nobody being able to add a cubit to their height. The customs agents evidently had no authority to check that sort of information.

For causing him to miss his flight? No apology of any sort. Would they pay for his added costs, for his having to stay overnight in the DFW area? They had no authority to do that.

Now this Robert C., who appears to be an intelligent, articulate, six-foot-five-inch American citizen able to maintain adequate control of his emotions in the face of bureaucratic incompetence, will be reluctant to vacation or to travel for business outside the United States.

Maybe he won’t want to fly inside the US, either. He was given a form to fill out and mail to Washington along with certified copies of his birth certificate and such, but he was cautioned to not expect a response for months.

I hope Robert C. is on his way to Philadelphia by now, but who knows? Maybe a new crew of federal agents is holding him this morning because they want to catch a bad guy with the same name who is highly unlikely to be as tall as he is.

We’re here, Kristi and I, in a perfectly pleasant motel supplied by American Airlines. It has three nice features, a good bed, free Internet, and free local call service. We are surrounded by nice people and we may get to see a movie this afternoon with Lyn before we return to DFW to try again for a flight home.

At best, Kristi won’t have a day off before having to return to work, unfortunately, but with luck we’ll greet the new year in a plane on an LA runway taking off for the 14 hour flight to Brisbane.

As Kristi’s father said to me by phone this morning, “It could be worse.” Yes, indeed, and here in the US, as 2007 comes to an end, certain things appear to be going in that direction, toward worse. — Bob