How much does US Airways suck?

This is difficult to quantify, but I can give a subjective account of their degree of suckitude. This happened back in March, but I am still pissed.

I was in New Hampshire with 2 colleagues participating in and leading portions of a fairly large meeting/seminar. This was on Good Friday (who scheduled that?) and I received a message from my travel agent about 3:00 that my 5:00 flight out of Manchester was cancelled.

I called US Air and waited on the phone for 10 minutes, finally got through to a human, and was immediately disconnected. At this point, I was cursing phone ACD systems, but wasn't overly teed-off at US Air. I call back, wait another 10 minutes, and finally get through to someone.

This person's native language clearly wasn't English, and I don't think that you could even say that her 2nd language was English as she couldn't understand anything that I said, and could barely utter a handful of English terms herself.

Every single time I said something, she would say "hold please", put me on hold, and then make me wait anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. After about 4 or 5 times of this crap, she finally told me very clearly that she couldn't help me any further because I had a "paper ticket".

I told her that not only did I not have a paper ticket, that I haven't had a paper ticket in many years and didn't know what the heck she was talking about. Her immediate response was "hold please".

She came back a minute two later and repeated her previous assurance about my alleged paper ticket. I insisted that I indeed did not have a paper ticket, and as a result received the dreaded "hold please".

By this time I was fuming. Fortunately for me, our travel agent had been busy actually trying to help us (actual customer service) and called my colleague back. She said that US Airways had booked us for a return trip the following Tuesday!

She changed the flight to the following day from Boston instead of Manchester, which began another ordeal. That flight also ending up being cancelled as well for mechanical reasons, and we ended up flying to DFW and renting a car.

I arrived home finally at 3:30 AM Easter morning, about a 1 1/2 days late.

This is clearly a business that has lost its way, and needs to be closed or taken over by a more competent organization.