My Story of Flying From Maine Across The U.S In A Global Outage

Now THIS. This story is wild. I know that I'm just one amongst the 10,000 planes that got impacted by all the wild delays due to the global internet shortage, but I've gotta tell the story from a Mainer's side. So it all started in Portland Jetport, which we all know is the easiest airport to fly out of due to its unusually small size. Its' beauty is the literal fact you can always count on getting through security within minutes of you getting there, so I knew something was up when I couldn't pass through so easily.

I was flying from Portland to L.A. on Thursday afternoon. For the first time ever there was a line at security. I travel a lot and I've quite literally never seen a line in any part of the jetport, so it was kind of my first question mark. Suddenly I got a notification on my phone that my flight was delayed on my connector to Charlotte not once, but twice. My cellphone seemed to have less service than usual so I didn't really bother going on social media or anything like that until my plane arrived. After 3 delays I finally made it across the country at 10:30pm when I should have been there around 6 p.m. No big deal things happen. I just didn't know I was smack dab in the beginning of a global internet shortage, and it was going to get worse before it got better.

Fast forward to Sunday morning when I was expecting to fly back to Maine, but the shortage had another plan for me. My 8am flight got delayed 4 times back to back, and after the 4th hour of sitting in the airport, I had to re-direct my flight to Miami where I got delayed YET AGAIN. At this point I knew there was a serious issue because I looked around and saw angry parents with frustrated, over-tired children trying to sleep on the floor of the airport because it was 11p.m. and we had to land in Philly as a connector to get back to Maine.

At this point, I have nothing on me but shorts and a tee-shirt since everything was packed in my bag. I had my wallet and my headphones and I had about 6 more hours in the airport to go. Stores were closing, food chains were packing up to go home, and vendors across the airport were closing down right in front of our faces. If we didn't buy a water bottle before 10 p.m we had no water for the rest of the night. I genuinely felt bad for the children traveling because they had no grasp on why they were being forced to sit in one spot and starve.

Fast forward 15 hours later and I finally make it back to Maine. You'd think it was going to stop there right? Well I wait and wait and wait for my bag to come out of the conveyor belt, and after about 30 minutes I deemed it lost. There was a line of the same passengers I had spent all day with flying across country who also were without bags. The airline had not only delayed us hours on end, but once we finally got home they couldn't even get our bags to come with us. What a mess. Luckily the next day they flew my bag in from Philly, which was fantastic. Once I opened the bag, whoever works below the airport on bag duty had gone through my bag, stole my ADHD medication, and threw back the package.

At this point I had to laugh and remind myself if this is my worst day, then I'm still doing okay. I feel terrible for the families that this affected in multiple airports, and my heart goes out to those whose bags were never found. What a wild ride. I've never been so happy to be back in Maine in my entire life. Did anybody else travel during the global shortage?!