10:15 AM PST -- I arrived at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) an hour before my flight was to leave. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that this is the holiday travel season, and four million other people were waiting in line just to check in. United’s policy is that no one -- no one! -- can board a flight with checked luggage within 45 minutes of departure. I had missed the deadline by five minutes due to the length of the check-in line. Thankfully, a handy customer service telephone was at the kiosk, and I spoke to someone in Darkest Africa who told that I would be unable to check in, since it was less than 45 minutes before the flight. I told him that I knew that now, was there anything he could do to put me on another flight? He said that it would be $50 to put me on standby to Chicago. “Great,” I said. “I’ll complain later.” He said I would have to talk to a ticket agent to be put on standby.

I flagged down one of the few ticket agents that are employed anymore to stand behind the self-check-in e-ticket kiosks. I labored under the impression that the man from Darkest Africa had somehow used the power of technology to patch my problem through to the nearest computer terminal. No such luck. I explained my problem to the ticket agent, who did the best she could to assist me. Seriously, SFO was a mad-house. The main security checkpoint at Terminal 3 (the United terminal) had a line going all the way down the terminal. What no one apparently knew was that there was another security checkpoint with a much shorter line. Why no one funneled all that traffic down there is a mystery to me. Such are the ways of airlines and airports.

Ticket agent lady put me on standby to a flight to Chicago. My original itinerary was from SFO to Las Vegas to Chicago to Cleveland. San Francisco and Chicago are both United hubs, so I would have ended up in Chicago no matter what.

1:00 PM PST -- The next flight to Chicago was at 9:45. At 9:45, we were informed that the flight was full and there were no standby seats available. Our standby information would be rolled over to the next Chicago flight, at 10:45. So we hauled ourselves to another gate. I noticed that I was in the same boat as two men and a woman. The man at the gate for the second Chicago flight said that the flight had been overbooked (note the interesting use of language here; in the past, it was called “oversold,” but that terminology places the agency on the airline for selling too many seats; when it’s called “overbooked,” it’s the customers’ fault for booking more seats than there are available, those nasty customers!). Don’t expect any first-class upgrades, he said. I asked him what my chances were of getting a seat on standby. “Not good,” he replied. The woman who was standing by on the previous flight said that she arrived at the airport two and-a-half hours before her flight was supposed to leave. And she still didn’t make the flight. She blamed “traffic control” in the ticketing area. What that meant was that she apparently stood in line for an hour and-a-half as time ticked by and her flight closed. She attempted, she said, to get the attention of a ticket agent -- or something -- to let her move up in the line, but no one did anything. The ticket agent only chided her for not arriving four hours early. She went to the customer service center at Gate 80 to see what they could do. I went there, as well.

I was told at Gate 80 that there was nothing she could do. All the flights for all the airlines were full for today; indeed, they were overbooked for today. My best bet, she said, would be to wait on standby for the rest of the day. I accepted this and went back to the 10:45 flight, where there was still the possibility that there might be seats.

No dice. The flight was totally full. I got rolled over to the next Chicago flight, which left at 11:30. The woman from the previous flights, who told me she was an ER nurse and had no problem dealing with patients spurting blood and as a result didn’t understand how they could mess up the logistics down at the ticket counter, got a flight at 2:00. It all depends on who you talk to, she said. I decided that I would wait for the 11:30 flight, and if nothing panned out, I would go to a different ticket counter.

Perhaps in an attempt to weed out the chaff, the 11:30 flight to Chicago changed gates three times. It was fairly easy to tell where the flight had moved, though. Just look for the unhappy mob milling about outside one of the gates. As expected, 11:30 came and went with no space on standby. I walked to the Gate 80 customer service center and found that the line was snaking down the terminal. I looked for another customer service center, figuring the one at Gate 80 wasn’t the only one in this terminal.

Found it! At Gate 76, which is sort of in a separate wing of Terminal 3, there was a smaller -- but no less able -- customer service center. Thank God for lazy people. I spoke to Sylvia . I explained how I had missed the cutoff by five minutes, how I had been placed on standby, and how three flights had come and gone with no standby space. Sylvia understood and took the time to help me out. She searched all flights for all airlines at all airports for today and said that they were booked. All of them. So she searched some more. She met with partial success: there were spaces on flights to Chicago, and there were spaces on flights from Chicago to Cleveland, but never at times that worked with each other. I had two options: I could fly to Los Angeles International (LAX), then to Washington/Dulles International (IAH), and then to Cleveland. The flight to LAX was at 8 PM, so I would have to spend the night in LAX. Or, she said, I could fly from SFO to Chicago O’Hare (ORD) at 2 PM and then fly from ORD to Cleveland at night. Maybe. Only problem was that the 2 PM flight from Chicago was delayed until 9 PM. It was displayed on all the departure screens, but curiously, the delay was not in her system. She found out only when I told her.

While we were haranguing, the spot on the LAX flight disappeared. She booked me on the 2 PM flight to Chicago, which is really a 9 PM flight to Chicago. I would have to spend the night in Chicago and then get on a 7:15 AM flight to Cleveland the next morning. There was a 4:15 PM flight to Chicago, and I probably wouldn’t make any flights out of Chicago by the time that came in, but she said I could check. She put me on standby for the 4:15 flight.

And now I’m waiting for the 4:15 flight. Admittedly, it was my fault that I got there late. I didn’t think that checking in at 7:45 would be such an ordeal -- in fact, I arrived at the check-in kiosk only five minutes late -- but I accept that. At the same time, United has proven once again that its logistics system is crazy, as it permits flights to be solidly overbooked, and during the holidays. The airlines have complex computer programs that guess how many people won’t show up for a flight and they then sell an equivalent amount of tickets beyond the capacity for a given flight. There is no room for error. Unfortunately, during the holiday travel season, things are tight and I wonder how many extra flights United is flying during this time.

I appreciate the hard work of Sylvia in trying to get me on a flight, even though she fully understood that it was my fault for being late. Rather than give me a bogus answer of, “Keep waiting on standby,” she helped me until she found me a way to get to Cleveland. When dealing with customer service people, I always stress that it’s better to be calm and amiable than angry, frazzled, and demanding. Customer service people have the power to give you what you want, and if you treat them like a fellow human being, they will go beyond the call of duty to help you, as another human being. Become demanding, though, and they will treat you the same way, not like a human being but like the belligerent “customer” that you are. If I hadn’t found her, I would still be trying to fly standby. One of the men from the original standby flight finally got a standby ticket to Chicago, but of course, that was only the beginning of his problems. He would be flying standby out of Chicago, as well. I think the only reason I even got a spot on the 2:00 flight was because it moved to 9:00, and undoubtedly several people changed theirs to the 4:15 flight to Chicago, freeing up space on the 2:00 flight. I’m grateful for that; I’ll take a red-eye. I’d sit behind any number of crying babies at this point.

6:00 AM CST -- I spent the rest of the day hanging out with this woman I described before -- whose name I don’t know. I know that she lives in Arcada and works as an ER nurse. We walked around the airport and watched as the line outside Gate 80’s customer service center grew quite long, and went so slowly that people started sitting down in line. We talked about how we would hate to be those customer service people, that today would have been a great day to call in sick.

Our flight to Chicago went well; both of us slept. Once we got to Chicago, we went our separate ways, as our connecting flights were in different concourses. It’s interesting having these one-time friends, these people whom you talk to freely, even though you met them only a few hours ago, and then leave behind, never to see again. Such is the way of the airport.

I’m in Chicago right now, waiting for my connection in Cleveland to leave at 7:35 AM CST. I have a boarding pass in hand, with a seat assignment and everything. I tried to sleep in the terminal, and for a while, it was quiet. I picked what I thought was a shady spot, but it was right next to the major security check-in area. At about 4:15, a whole bunch of TSA screeners gathered there to talk. I slept through it, anyhow. The airport is something I usually think of as running 24 hours. But it doesn’t run 24 hours; the security areas were closed off, all the shops were closed, and only the Christmas music coming through the speakers and the occasional recording warning that taxis can’t solicit rides were signs that any human beings lived there once.

The security line in Chicago, even at 6:15, doesn’t look that long. The problems in San Francisco seemed to be a Perfect Storm of little things. The man who finally got on the standby flight at 9:00 said that a flight to Boston changed to a smaller plane, forcing about 100 people to fly standby. Since they were already booked on a flight, and it was the airline’s fault that they weren’t booked anymore, they got priority when standby seats became available. This is one of the reasons why we had such a hard time finding standby seats.

7:57 PM EST -- I got into Cleveland right on time: 10:00 AM EST. Then I got home and took a nap.