"Hello, Ascot Ops, do you have a revised itinerary for me?"
"RevItin? Why? We've still got you due out at **00"
"We can't do that - the outbound hasn't even landed yet! What was its departure time"
"Err...don't kno...standby...err, it was due out at **00"
"Yes, I know what time it was supposed to take off, but what time did it actually take-off? Haven't you got the deprture message?"
"Um, err, err, it must be here somewhere....."
"Indeed it must. But there's only 30 min flex on this route for max CDT and if it's later than that, we'll either be stuck at Gander with 150 pax at midnight local, or else we leave here tomorrow at a time which maximises our CDT as we'll need to de-ice etc - and that could be a faff from here because they'll be busy just then"
"Oh. Err, what's your suggestion....."
Thanks team. I then phoned Brize to be told that the outbound was actually over 2 hours late off due, predictably enough, to yet another serviceability snag...
Spoke to local DAMO and asked what'd happen to our pax if we delayed until early the next morning. "We'll keep them at their barracks" was the answer. So, as no-one was going to be inconvenienced by a midnight Gander-faff, we delayed until the next day.
Fine. Except the DAMO forgot that the arriving passengers were expected to use the same barracks accommodation - so our pax actually spent the night sleeping at the airport on floors various. No idea why the DAMO didn't find them an hotel. The first I heard of this was when Bwigadier someone or other complained to the AOC; there then followed a long, boring process of trying to pin the blame on me until the station told Group to knob off......