It's raining on the outside and on in the inside!

Delays.. We all hate them.. And of course they are going to happen... Not only does it inconvenience the passengers but let me tell you how it effects our operations. I was supposed to be done with my trip yesterday at 1pm. My last trip was to go to Baltimore and then back to Atlanta and then home! We go to Baltimore and the pilots told me when we landed that the control tower sent them a reroute message in flight. Thank goodness it was only for the pilots! We (the flight attendants) did not get one!! We deplaned the passenger's and as I started getting my first cleaned and ready for the next set of passengers, a group of flight attendants come on with their luggage saying this plane was going to Florida not Atlanta. Confused I made a PA telling my other flights to get their luggage and meet me at the gate. I called our in-flight operations and apparently we were stuck in Baltimore for 6.15 hours.. Really? Out of all the places, Baltimore..? There's no crew lounge, no where to get good food, and nothing to do? So the airline I work sent us to a hotel near by so we could rest. This was my third hotel to stay in within two days. We go to our hotel and our report time to the airport was 5:55pm. Once we arrived back to the airport, our flight was delayed another two and half hours. At this point we had timed out of our duty day. FAA has rules were flight attendants can only work 14 hour duty day (yes... 14 hour duty days are very common for us). We started at 5:20am that day an it was now 9:45pm. In-flight operations called me since I was the lead flight attendant and asked if we wanted to exercise our right to not work the flight and layover or wavier our "work rules" and work the flight. They offered us four hours of extra pay if we worked the flight that night. If we decided to not work the flight they would have to fly flight attendants up which would delay the flight another two hours, they would have to pay for us a hotel, bump paying passengers off the morning flight just to get us back to our base because they are required to, and pay us extra for flying us into our "off day". At this point the flight was 90% non-revenue (airline employee's) and there was only 19 total passengers... The rest of my crew was 50-50, half did not want to work it and half wanted to work it. So I had to make the final decision... I decided to just work the flight. I did not want to stay in another hotel room, my OWN bed at home sounded great. I wavered our work rules. The gate agents made the announcement how we had timed out but decided to work the flight and asked the passengers to please be kind to us because we did not have to work this flight if we did not want to.  We started boarding and everyone was so kind to us. I decided to comp all drinks for everyone because most of them had been stuck in the airport since 11:40am. When we FINALLY arrived in ATL everyone thanked us so much and a few people even hugged me.  The kindness we got from everyone made this very very long day worth it. Some crew members were not happy with me because of my decision but I felt like I made the right decision: we got paying/non-rev passengers to their destination, we got the airplane back to ATL so it could work it's morning flight, and we saved our company a lot of money. So when your next flight is delayed please don't go up to the gate agent and bitch, it's not going to get you there ANY faster what-so-ever and be kind to your crew members (they cannot control the weather or mechanical issues), there is a lot of "behind the scenes" going on. Just sit back and relax, it will work itself out!!!