Don’t get me wrong, I think email is a very powerful vehicle. It generates dialogs, sales, relationships and more. But can it make your wishes come true? Here is my story.
I am on my way to London on Virgin Airlines, which I have heard nothing but incredible things about. From the initial greeting at my house by the complimentary town car driver to the amazing service provided at the airport lounge, I felt that everyone had been correct. I was a Virgin brand-loyalist already.
Once I found out that the plane seats fold 100% down into a bed AND you get a free massage during the flight, in addition to the catalog of over 30 movies (woo hoo—I finally got to see Dreamgirls), I was in shock. Could an airline really be this good?
I was so excited that I sent an email to my friend—”I’m never leaving the plane” is all it said. And THAT is the exact moment when it all happened. Somehow my email transmitted a signal to the world that enacted the following chains of events:
First, I put my dinner order in and promptly fell asleep.
After sleeping for what seemed like a loooong time, I woke up starving and glanced at my watch—it was 3 hours later!!! OMG, I thought, I missed dinner. But I hadn’t, in fact, because we were still on the tarmac at JFK.
The pilot told us that because of the long wait, we no longer had enough fuel to get us to London and we would “try” to get to Dublin to refuel. No offense, sir, but “trying” to get to Dublin? What happens if we don’t quite make it? Isn’t it just water???
I went back to sleep.
This time I wake up to the smell of food and see we are in the air and…yay! everyone is eating…except me. Yep, they FORGOT I wanted dinner and gave it away. But I did get a glass of Diet Coke (with no ice—Grrrr).
OK—tuning the world out—watching the movie…
Finally back to sleep again. This time I wake up to the sound of the “we are preparing to land” message. Hooray, we will soon be in Dublin, I thought. I looked at my watch and it said 7:45am. Wow! We weren’t supposed to land in London until 9 am—and even 3 hours late we made are getting in early? That’s cool. Um…until it hit me…that was New York time! It was almost 1 PM local. And more bad news. We actually made it to Heathrow on the low fuel, but they are asking us to circle, and we can’t do that, so we have to land in Gatwick.
We land, pull up to the gate, they open the doors—but no one is allowed out. Instead, the plan is to refuel and fly back to Heathrow (think LaGuardia to JFK for those of you not familiar with London’s airports). One and a half later, we are still on the ground and they decide not to fly back but to let us off here.
We all, very unhappily, get off the plane. But once we get onto the jet bridge the airline informs us they cannot open the doors to allow us access to the terminal—so we wait…for another hour, in a hot hallway.
And THAT is when it hit me. If I would not have sent the email saying, “I am never getting off this plane,” none of this would have happened.
Call me superstitious, but I do believe the email gods were alerted and caused this chain of events. Each of you reading this should test this out.
WARNING: Please make it something you want to come true—or else be subject to the consequences.
—Jeanniey Mullen
