My flight was cancelled, and for some reason no one bothered to announce that fact an passengers were not alerted until we approached the desk at the gate fifteen minutes after we were supposed to begin boarding. I walked up just as the young lady in front of me was simultaneously bitching at the woman behind the counter and the person on the other end of her cell phone.
She was probably nineteen or twenty, and acting like a complete asshat. I went downstairs to the other desk and got in line. After several minutes, I got to the front of the line and the man behind the desk put me on a flight to D.C., where I would then hop another flight to Chicago. I would be landing four hours later than originally planned. Fine.
I killed forty-five minutes, then boarded without incident.
On the flight to DC, the nineteen-year-old sat behind me next to a British guy. She proceeded to talk at him for most of the flight, which is how I learned that she had been sent to Ohio, where her parents would drive five hours each way to pick her up.