Personifies the “friendly skies” concept.
I was originally supposed to be in Chicago at 9AM. USAir called and said my 7AM flight would be delayed and they wanted to route me through Baltimore. Delays caused me to miss that connection too. Made the United flight as the last standby. With the diversion mentioned above, I ended up reaching O'Hare at roughly 1AM. Just to top things off, the line for cabs at that hour stretched the length of the terminal. Loooong day.
Not the first time I have seen this. I worked as an Airport Operations Officer at a medium size airport in the US. The nearest large airport was Dallas and when Dallas is shut down by thunderstorms many aircraft would divert to my airport filling all gate and ramp spaces. On one such occasion I was driving the parking ramp when I saw a pilot leaning out of his cockpit window calling me over. He pointed to a gate about 500 yards away and asked if I could meet the pizza delivery guy who would shortly show up. I said no problem, drove over to the gate. The delivery guy showed up a few minutes later and I took the 20 or so pizzas back to the aircraft and handed them up thru the crew door. The aircraft was stuck on the ramp a few more hours but at least the passengers were not hungry. That was American Airlines.