Robert Hope

So as a computer programmer I am all too aware of the potential for complete and catastrophic failure of a computer system at any time…and the ramifications that no doubt follow. Such an ironic occurrence, where my life gets a bit shredded by such a failure, occurred last night, when we arrived at San Jose Airport to catch our JetBlue red-eye flight to Boston for our family reunion.

All of the JetBlue computer systems at San Jose Airport were offline.

You can imagine the chaos that followed. The only thing we could do is check in via the online web-enabled kiosks. All of our luggage bag tags? Hand written. Boarding passes? Hand processed. Determining that everyone is on board? Let’s count the open seats. Assigned seating? Heh.

We arrived at 6:20 pm for our 9pm flight, and found ourselves stuck in line to get checked in for an hour; hand writing five bag tags alone took 20 minutes. The flight left late, landed late, and we had bets on how many of our bags were actually going to make the flight to Boston with us. Luckily those 20 minutes were well-used, as everything arrived as it should have. Thankfully the kids slept pretty much the whole flight, at least that part of taking the red-eye went according to plan…but poor Eli got sick at the end and spent most of the time while they were waiting for me to get the rental car with his face in an airsick bag. He’s doing ok now though.

In any event, I feel for those JetBlue employees last night. Talk about a tough job, managing that crisis. I’m just glad it wasn’t my computer system that failed on them!