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(Image: United Airlines)
I just experienced the weirdest problem chain I ever encountered flying, and I thought it would be important to document it for all history because it was so bizarre and indicative of… something that I can’t even put my head around.
It all begins when we have already boarded the plane. My wife and I had a really nice surprise in that we ran into Bill Patterson, the SVP and GM for Salesforce’s Service Cloud and, more importantly, a dear friend. We sat near him.
We were blabbing away when suddenly Bill laughed and said he had a gate change notice for the plane, even though everyone had completely boarded the plane. He was told we were being moved from Gate 65 to Gate 63 at SFO. Ah, a glitch in the app. Something to note. Nothing to actually do, though. Then, one of the other passengers mentioned the same thing.
Obviously, this was a mistake, right? I mean, we all had boarded already, and they were preparing the plane for takeoff. Doors shut. Engines idling.
Or was it?
It wasn’t.
Nope.
There was a problem that had triggered the notification. We had an issue. An issue of…
Toilet Security
Yes, toilet security. The first-class toilet handle had broken, and this created a possible security breach and that was why we had to change planes. How, I thought, does a broken toilet handle create a security breach? Poison gas escaping through the open door? Evil creatures coming from the bowl and becoming uncontainable? No way of keeping the Mile-High Club private? I could also go into dozens of scatological jokes, but in the interests of what remains a vestige of good taste for this post, I won’t.
Turns out that the toilet handle being broken meant that the pilots couldn’t use that one and thus would have to walk to another restroom more than a few feet away and that would expose them to danger. Understandable. Thus, the only apparent solution was that we all might have to deplane and then move to another plane at an adjacent gate due to the toilet security issue.
A few tense minutes passed. Would we have to move? Would we be able to stay? What is the nature of the universe? All this needed to be answered in the next minute or two or we would start to be very late in taking off. Except the last one, of course.
Ahh, we could stay, we were told. Even though the handle remained broken and the toilet unusable, it was no longer a security issue and we could get ready to go home. I had to presume that the heroic pilots bravely agreed to hold it the entire 5.5-hour trip home.
We were on our way… or were we?
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Alt_Out of Control_Delete
We were not. After getting ready to go (no toilet security pun intended), we were told that, in fact, due to the now mythical gate change, the passenger manifest was deleted after it was transferred over to the other gate. So, we now had to deplane and re-board once they reloaded the now-deleted passenger list. They did, and we did. Off the plane and back on.
Passengers seated. Seatbelts on. Seats upright. Getting ready for the video…
Oops.