Not the same thing, but my bosses secretary used to book flights and accommodation for all the company executives.
There was an important conference in Paris and people were flying from all over the UK. Anxious to avoid having all the senior management on the same plane, she routed the ones in the North through Manchester and the ones in the South through Heathrow.
As it turned out the Manchester flight was underused, so it was routed via Heathrow and picked up the southern contingent on the way.
I remembered another one related to people not understanding how big certain states are. An acquaintance asked his secretary to book a flight for him to a conference he was attending in El Paso. She books some flights and sends him an itinerary. He sees a flight to Houston, and assumes there must be a connecting flight from there to El Paso, but doesn’t see any information about the connecting flight. He asks he secretary about it, and she told him flights to Houston were cheaper, so she booked him a flight there and assumed he could drive to El Paso from there.
To save everybody else the trouble I’ll share that Google Maps says it’s 745 miles straight along Interstate 10 from Houston to El Paso. So 10-ish hours of driving if you don’t stop to eat; just to pee and buy gas plus more snacks to eat on the road ahead.
Yeah - they aren’t exactly hundreds of miles inland. Right on the ocean can put you at the mercy of the sea, and a lot of the land is shifting sands and marshlands. Twenty-forty miles inland up a navigable river means you have the chance to actually dock the ships safely and put up buildings to house the goods, plus have fresh drinking water in your wells.
It was clearly squeezed out through the Bab al Mandab strait, after which it slid out over the Somali peninsula and started floating down the East coast. A little nugget broke off of it and lingered behind as Socotra.
Reminds me of the first time I visited my sister in Austin TX (or ATX in my short-lazyhand). It was my first time to go to ATX. Flying from SFO, I was exhausted and once I got on the plane I went to sleep. It was a good rest, sorely needed, and I was woken up by the pilot’s announcement that we were descending into ATX and please fasten your seatbelts, etc. I looked outside the window and saw lush trees, bodies of water, rolling hills. It looked like beautiful country.
Except that in my hazy state and with this being my first time to the ATX area, I was certain I’d gotten on the wrong flight and was landing somewhere in Pennsylvania. This cannot be Texas!, my brain screamed. I’d driven across TX on I-10 (the eastern part was at night; western part was during the day), and I’d served in Fort Bliss out of El Paso. Texas is flat! Texas is parched! Texas is not like what I am seeing!
Well in the end, it was welcome to the Texas Hill County, a beautiful part of the state! The ATX area is gorgeous.
Good thing you didn’t end up at the airport that really is labeled ATX:
Many folks complain about the process of scanning boarding passes as a last chance check that you’re getting on the right flight. I can say that since we switched to doing that 100% 10-15 years ago, the number of people wrongly on my flights has dropped from about 1 per my workweek to “just doesn’t happen anymore”.
That’s no help if you bought a ticket to the wrong Rochester or San Jose, but it at least ensures we’ll deliver you to wherever your ticket wants to go.
I will occasionally encounter people getting on the wrong plane in situations where you’re walking outside and up steps to a plane. But AFAIK the mistake has always been corrected prior to take off.
I’ve heard stories like this before, and still wonder how it ever happened, and even more so when someone ends up in a different country, where presumably passports/visas would be confirmed. For domestic flights, I guess they just didn’t check tickets to prior to boarding in the past? Also, I may be misremembering, but I thought the flight staff always did headcount checks.
They did check, but it was all manual. You’ve seen the partly controlled chaos at boarding time. And with multiple agents working a flight it’s easy for Bill to think Sally checked this guy’s passport and Sally to think Bill did. Oops.
Back in the paper-based Dayes of Yore if the boarding agent makes a mistake on 1 in 1000 tickets he/she glances at and puts into the pile, that still lets a wrong somebody down a wrong chute about once per workday per agent.
As to headcount, yes they did. But the agent is counting the collected tickets/boarding passes and the FAs are counting heads. That detects folks sneaking on. It doesn’t do anything to ensure the right people are on.
Remember sneak-on isn’t just about somebody with no ticket trying to get a free ride.
Somebody who has a ticket for this flight but that somehow it isn’t collected at the door as they get on this flight, keeps the right to use the same ticket again on some future flight. So anyone who flies regularly between A & B has an incentive to try to sneak past the ticket surrender point since soon enough they’ll have an opportunity to re-use the uncollected ticket. There is lots of other scam-artistry well known to a certain class of nuisance traveler that the industry would love to stop.
Beyond the scammers, unless you’ve been on the other side of a boarding process it’s hard to imagine just how oblivious some most people are. Despite the flight signage at the gate, despite the incessant blaring PAs, they have no idea they’re at the wrong place. Folks who don’t travel regularly are mostly baffled by the whole thing. The idea there such a thing as time zones eludes them, so they may be an hour early or late at their connecting gate. They may not know there are two Rochesters on Earth. They may be so glued to their phone they wouldn’t notice a tornado coming through the terminal. etc. Those folks, and there are a lot of them, need to be protected from their own obliviousness. And of course the more guardrails we put up, the more oblivious they can get away with being. So they do.
I was never the biggest fan of football or other sports but it was only when I joined a fantasy football league 7 or 8 years ago that I realized the Washington Football Team (it was called something else at the time) was based in/near Washington DC and not from that west coast state.
Some of my early geographical knowledge came from the board game Risk. It was a little disappointing to learn that the size of the Ukraine and Kamchatka has been so exaggerated. Still, the strategy of concentrating on Siam or Greenland remains sound - no wonder these places remain overmilitarized.
In the 1980s, my parents would sometimes try out a restaurant described in the book “Roadfood,” by the Sterns (the same couple who authored the wonderful, Cecil Adams-esque “Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.”).
Anyway, one time we wandered around the town of Ellsworth, Maine, looking for a particular mom-and-pop diner on “East Main Street.” No luck. Finally we realized it was in some place called Ellsworth, Wisconsin!
Jump forward over 30 years, and now I happen to live in Wisconsin (grew up on the east coast). With my mother (and now wife and kid), I finally got to try the real deal! The original restaurant had been replaced with a less interesting one, but close enough.
This is me except the Washington Wizards, formerly known as the Washington Bullets. I thought the Bullets just stopped existing and then the Wizards were a new team based in Washington State, which made sense in my head since it seems like an oblique reference to hippie culture.
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