Yeah, I went out Thursday night to fly some practice approaches in actual with an instructor, since it's been about six months since I've actually done an approach. Unfortunately, events conspired to make me an hour late for the two hour appointment, and then when we called for clearance at the end of the runway we get the "call back in 20 minutes" routine. Last time that happened (going to Gaston's), it turned into about an hour delay before we actually launched. So I made the call to scrub the flight.
I'm doing a sim flight this afternoon instead. Definitely not as beneficial as approaches in actual!
I will mention that:
a) FSS offered a round-robin flight plan, though I know that Chicago Approach really doesn't like them;
b) The 1-800 Clearance Delivery number gave us Chicago tower's direct number for the call-back, thereby eliminating the middleman;
c) the instructor didn't really believe the "call back in 15 - 20 minutes" part of it and got not so gently reminded when he opted to call back almost immediately, "just in case."
In his defense, my cell phone was, shall we say, unreliable, and his was flashing a low battery warning. And the batteries in my ANR headset had just given up the ghost on top of it. So it was a bunch of things that came together to lead to my canceling the flight.