Deviation Success

It was a near thing, once again, but I made it to Columbus. Last weekend's debacle made me doubly paranoid about deadheading, b/c two misses in a row would have been VERY bad for my career. I had a ticket on American from ABQ-CMH through DFW on Sunday, again a day early from the scheduled deadhead from MEM-CMH. On Saturday, the severe weather center in Norman, OK was predicting a huge tornado event throughout tornado alley, but it was supposed to subside on Sunday. I moved up my ABQ-DFW leg anyway so as to have a backup out of ABQ, and giving me a 3 hour layover in case things were running late. When I checked how things were going Sunday morning, DFW was in the middle of a line of thunderstorms that stretched way up past Kansas, but it looked like things would be okay for my early-afternoon flight. Then I got a message from American that the DFW-CMH leg would be delayed 45 minutes. Now, that leg wasn't until 8:00 at night, so the fact that they were already delaying it made me very concerned. Easy to cancel the last flight on a Sunday night if things got too dicey. I called American and asked why the change and they said their forecasters were predicting more storms later that evening. I called our corporate travel office and re-booked on and earlier United (ugh) flight through Denver and hustled down to the airport. This new ticket initially cost an additional $200. Then American also re-booked me on the same United flight, a really bad indicator. Unfortunately, United smelled blood and raised the price while I was cancelling the American flight (too soon), so I was now out $300. I finally got to the hotel in Columbus around 1:00 am, just thankful to be able to check in with Fedex saying "I'm here!" Next month, NO DEADHEADS! I'll just jumpseat to MEM on Fedex and if the flight cancels or delays, it won't be my problem...of course, it means I have to fly out of Memphis which is always a pain.