My wife and I recently celebrated our 10-year anniversary with a trip to Key West, Fla. The vacation itself was fabulous.

And then we spent an entire day and night (and half the next day) sitting in three different airports over a 29-hour span enduring one exasperating delay after another, a stretch interrupted only by lousy food, heartburn and, you guessed it, lost luggage.

We dropped off our rental car at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in plenty of time for our 2 p.m. flight home. With one connection, we were expecting to arrive in Sacramento just nine hours later and thus get home well before midnight local time.

Yeah, right.

First, our flight got pushed back to 2:15. Then it was delayed until around 3:30 and eventually until well after 5. There were a few thunderstorms in the area (common for this time of year), but the excuses we were getting from American Airlines ranged from “weather” to “unavailable flight crew” to “sorry, that pilot can’t work any more hours today” to finally — and I’m not kidding — “Our incoming flight had to land in Palm Beach because it was running out of fuel.”

After five delays, I went to the ticket counter and asked if there was a quicker way to Sacramento than the one we’d planned, which was a connecting flight in Charlotte. The guy behind the counter told me to go through Dallas, because “even if we have to bring in another plane, there will be a flight to Dallas tonight.”

Sounded good to me. We re-booked for Dallas, and our flight was set for 7:30 p.m. Before we even made it back to our seats in the terminal, it got delayed to 7:49. Minutes later it got pushed back to 8:09. That continued for hours: Every 45 minutes or so they’d announce another delay, eventually pushing our flight back to around midnight.

I went to plead my case to a different guy. He looked past me with an oddly vacant stare and said, “This is getting worse every day.” (Apparently, it had been a tough week for the ticketing crew at American Airlines.) He did tell me to check with American in Dallas, assuming we ever got there — “They’ll get you a hotel room for the night, and they won’t let me do it here because they’re afraid people who get the rooms won’t actually show up to use them.”

Ten hours after we were supposed to take off, we finally boarded a plane. We arrived in Dallas at 2 a.m. local time. I didn’t see anyone from American Airlines waiting around with a hotel voucher, so we decided to make a night of it right there in the airport.

As it turned out, our adventure was just beginning.

As the sun was coming up, I glanced at my American Airlines app and was only slightly surprised to discover that our luggage was still back in Florida. Not only that, they’d already given our four suitcases (and my guitar) a ride to North Carolina and back on the connecting flight we were originally going to take.

In other words, our luggage had already spent more time on an airplane than we had despite 18 consecutive hours of earnest attempts.

We finally arrived in Sacramento at noon local time, a full 27 hours after we first checked in at Fort Lauderdale. Our luggage — by now, no doubt, a member of the frequent flier club in its own right — arrived a mere two hours after us.

As soon as we got home, I took a shower, changed the clothes I’d been wearing for 37 hours and wrote what I thought was a very powerful letter to American requesting some reasonable compensation for the past couple of days. Seems fair, right?

Two days later, they emailed me an “apology” along with a credit for an upcoming flight worth (drumroll please) 25 bucks!

I could go on. But the rest of our vacation was so fantastic, it really was still worth all of that trouble at the end, which I’m sharing with you only in the interest of camaraderie — because lousy service from king-sized corporations just might be the last thing that still unites us as a country these days.

Mike Wolcott is the editor of the Chico Enterprise-Record. Reach him at mwolcott@chicoer.com.

If this situation wasn’t so sickening, so heartbreaking, so horrific and gut-wrenching awful, you wouldn’t know rather to laugh or cry. But some comedy of errors are so bad and so redundant, there’s nothing comic-like about them — despite the combined Keystone Cops-like efforts of those who keep this sick show alive.

“Whoops! Clumsy me!”

Remember that line? It’s from an old pizza commercial on TV. The gag was, these two clownish oafs were making pizza and kept “accidentally” spilling more stuff into the mix, resulting in a bigger and thus more filling pie.

“Whoops! Clumsy me!”

If they remade that commercial today, the people making the mess that’s churning our stomachs would be representing PG&E and the state of California and a few other choice entities, and the only thing that’s cooking is damn near every square inch of northern California.

Again. And again. Year after year after year, and the ingredients they’re throwing into the mix might as well be napalm and gasoline.

“Whoops! Clumsy me!”

Look, there goes another equipment fail — PG&E just started another fire! And boy, look at that blaze take off, thanks to decades of no forest management, extra-dry conditions and nobody giving a damn, unless it looked like a mighty fine day to swoop into town for a photo op.

Speaking of which, Governor Newsom came up to a remote stretch of Glenn County on Wednesday, where he talked about climate change and the August Fire (which has been out since last fall). He waited until Saturday to visit the 26-day-old Dixie Fire, which is near the half-million-acre mark and shows little signs of slowing down — especially after blasting into Greenville on Wednesday night, leaving behind little but charred remains of buildings and the crushed lives of innocent people with generations of mountain blood in their veins.

500,000 acres. It sounds like a mighty poor way to describe a fire these days. Remember when a 5,000 acre fire was considered huge? Or 20,000 acres? Hell, these days, that’s barely an adequate description of one day’s worth of fire growth.

If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to think the Dixie Fire has already covered more square miles than we’ll ever see from the floundering $100 billion bullet train, which continues to suck money out of taxpayers’ pockets with the same velocity as those wild embers flying around Plumas County. So we don’t have money to keep the Susanville prison (and its inmate firefighting program) open — but just think of how fast we’re going to be able to get from Merced to Fresno!

“Whoops! Clumsy me!”

It’s beyond sad how the self-proclaimed “most advanced state in the nation” cannot get a grip on this. It has spun completely out of control and, as we noted in our “What’s left to burn?” story a few days back, we are a long, long way from being out of this sick series of horror shows — most of which continue to star the same bad actors.

Camp Fire? Whoops, PG&E equipment started it. The Dixie Fire, which started very close to the same spot as the Camp Fire, almost three years later, despite repeated assurances of safety improvements? “Uh, yeah, whoops, we might have started that one too.” And then the Fly Fire, which ended up merging with the Dixie Fire? “Yep. Sorry. That might be our bad too. Clumsy me!”

And if you think the point of this column is to lay all of the blame on PG&E, you’re wrong. They barely qualify as a co-star in this inept lineup of overpaid charlatans.

For example, we’ve got a state led by a guy apparently more concerned with sagging poll numbers and a mounting recall election than anything having to do with fire protection, an effort he admitted he “accidentally” overstated by almost 700 percent recently. And hey, how about that decision to close the prison in Susanville earlier this year, which (pending a judge’s restraining order last week) killed off the inmate firefighting program? Think those well-trained and experienced men might be a valuable resource for our overwhelmed fire crews in helping to battle these infernos in the future?

“Whoops! Clumsy me!”

What about that undergrowth? All those dangerous trees next to power lines, on public lands and elsewhere? Well, guess what — have you tried to cut down a tree in this state lately? There’s so much environmental red tape suffocating most common-sense clean-up efforts, you couldn’t cut through it with a king-sized Husqvarna and a 24-inch-bar.

And let’s not forget who actually owns most of the forest land in our state: the federal government. But they’re so busy scrambling to cover a mishandled pandemic and a still-wide-open southern border — “Come on in! No mask required. Whoops! Clumsy me!” — you have to wonder if anyone other than Doug LaMalfa could actually find Butte or Plumas County on a map.

But other than our congressman, who has asked for federal help to fight these fires, none of these other people are ever going to breathe this smoke or walk across these charred lands. It’s apparently little more to them than another political football, a reason to point fingers and send sarcastic staff-written tweets, or (especially) a chance to blame everything on the person on the other side of the aisle. Clumsy you!

In short, we’ve been led into a burning chasm of hell-like intensity by people who offer nothing but election-year promises that they cannot keep, because they have no idea how to actually solve any of this, and refuse to listen to any of the people who do.

And let’s talk about climate change. It’s a very popular pastime right now for people on one side of the aisle to point fingers at the other and say “These science deniers refuse to do anything about climate change and that’s why the fires are out of control and the lakes are so low!” But here’s the thing: the people who are doing the finger-pointing — that would be the Democrats — have ALL of the power in this state. If they wanted to craft and enforce the strictest climate change laws in the history of the planet today, there is absolutely nothing James Gallagher or Jim Nielsen could do to stop them. The Republican legislators in this state have no power. Zero. Zilch. Nada. To blame climate change and thus the fires on them is … well, typical.

The truth is, many of these people in power are frauds. All they care about is fundraising and getting re-elected; period. And we’re the ones paying the price, figuratively and literally. Clumsy me? More like Stupid Us.

Finally — let’s go back to the first day of the Dixie Fire. Cal Fire, being fully aware of the location and potential for a big spread, called for air attacks. But with the fire still in the single-digit acre stage, they had to ground the air attack that first day — and again the next morning — because somebody was flying drones in the area. Who knows how this fire could have turned out differently if the air attack had continued and the fire progress slowed? Would we even be talking about this today? And why aren’t we just shooting these damn drones out of the sky in this kind of situation? How stupid IS this, anyway?

“Oh, sorry I grounded your airplanes. But look at all these cool pictures I got from my new drone! Clumsy me!”

If I sound mad, and even more over-the-top than usual, well, guess what … I am. Honestly, I’m so pissed at this point — there’s a word you don’t see in print often —  I’m swinging out at everything in my inflammable-brush-covered path. And I don’t really care who I hit or whose feelings I hurt, so long as they’ve got anything to do with the problem that’s absolutely killing our counties and our rural communities. And until some of these people — our so-called “leaders,” and supposed brightest minds — get locked in a room with people who know what the hell they’re talking about and make an actual, true, real, no-holds-barred commitment to changing the landscape, none of this is going to stop. We’ll keep watching plumes of smoke in the sky every summer and fall as our surroundings burn through a hellish eternity while those in charge shrug, point fingers and pose for the cameras.

That’s why I’m so angry. If you’re offended or hurt by anything I said here today, my best guess is you’re probably part of the problem too.

Whoops. Clumsy me.

Mike Wolcott is editor of the Enterprise-Record. He can be reached at mwolcott@chicoer.com. This column was updated Sunday to reflect the fact that Newsom visited the Dixie Fire area Saturday.

There were also massage therapists, sign language interpreters, choreographers, lots of freelance journalists and, of course, all manners of Democrats and Republicans, all united under the most unlikely of circumstances.

It took Assembly Bill 5 to bring such a diverse group to the west steps of the Capitol on Tuesday morning, where around 300 people listened to several speakers describe how the “gig economy” law had impacted — or, in many cases, eliminated — their livelihoods.

The “Rally To Repeal AB5” event, sponsored by Assemblyman Kevin Kiley (R-Sacramento) and Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez (R-Lake Elsinore), was aimed at rallying support for AB1928, which would overturn the “gig economy” law sponsored by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“Organized labor has played a vital role in humanizing the American workplace — grounding our economic lives in the values of dignity, autonomy, and respect for our common good,” Kiley said at the beginning of the rally. “Assembly Bill 5 is an affront to those values.”

If there was one common theme in the speeches, it was this — none of the people impacted by AB5 wanted the government’s help in the first place.

“We are not stupid,” said Peter Kalivas, artistic director at the PKG Project, a San Diego-based, world-class dance theater group. “We do not need to be saved from ourselves. We can negotiate our own contracts. AB5 is insulting.”

AB5 changed labor law in California by setting more-restrictive guidelines on businesses that hire independent contractors. In many cases, it’s left businesses with the choice of making the contractors full-time employees, severely curtailing the number of times they use them, or not using them at all. Everyone in attendance seemed to fall into one of the two latter groups.

Author Walter Kirn said he grew up on a farm in Minnesota, with a dream of becoming a writer, and was mesmerized by the California lifestyle. He definitely achieved his golden dream in California — his novel “Up in the Air” became a film starring George Clooney — but, says AB5 has already rendered much of the landscape unrecognizable.

“Little did I ever think that California, a state that brought us great music from bands like the Jefferson Airplane, would become the first state that would make musicians stand outside and not be able to express themselves,” Kirn said.

The author also had harsh words on the impact of the law on the media, warning community journalism was being dealt a blow from which it might not be able to recover.

“This bill cuts them off at the knees,” he said.

While the speakers told stories of how the law has impacted their lives, everyone in the crowd had their own stories to tell. And in some cases, they’d been victimized twice by the same law.

Among those was Petaluma’s Jeff Sherman, who has worked for decades as both a musician and a scopist, which reviews, edits and proofreads transcripts produced by a court reporter. AB5, he said, effectively shut down not one, but both of his livelihoods.

“The lady I worked for (as a court transcriber) quit because she didn’t want to deal with it (AB5),” he said. “Work is leaving the state because of this law.”

His gigs as a musician have dried up as well. He said the 10-member band he was a member of had to increase their per-gig fee by $650 to cover the extra costs brought on by the law — and by doing so, they basically priced themselves out of business.

“It’s gutting the arts in California,” he said.

Another musician at the rally was Colleen Keane, who came up from Ventura with a sign that said “Democrat — repeal AB5.”

“I don’t have any place to sing (because of the law), so I came here,” she said.

Gary Smithhart, an independent trucker from Hayward, said his group of 400 truckers “has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because of this. This isn’t the state of California any more — it’s the state of confusion.”

AB1928 is one of several bills that have been introduced with the aim of overturning all or part of AB5, which has officially been on the books less than a month. The authors of AB1928 have also written a Constitutional amendment that would overturn AB5.

Other bills include SB875, which would exempt interpreters and translators; AB1925, which would exempt small businesses (with fewer than 100 employees and an average of less than $15 million in gross receipts the past three years); and two separate bills that would exempt newspaper delivery drivers and freelance journalists.

AB5 currently limits freelancers to 35 assignments per year before that publication would be required to make them a part-time or full-time employee.