Delayed in TPE

This has been a hard travel day so far.
Of course, this day will involve close to 20 hours of flying/flying related time and involves time travel (arriving earlier than I left on the same day!), that makes it even more difficult.
So here is how the first leg of this latest “Longest Day” began:
First off, I had to cross the street to catch the “express basi” that goes to Taipei Taoyuan Airport (the airport formerly known as CKS). Dun sound too bad, right? Wrong! Signage is scarce, but after 20 minutes of stress and searching, I find the exit from the Taipei Railway Station MRT that brings me to the basi terminal (it’s exit 9 out of the mall, in case any of you were wondering). Take the lift to the surface before you hit exit 9 because it’s all stairs.
And then I promptly pass out on the basi, waking up in time when we arrive at Terminal 1. Check in, passport control and duty free shopping pass as usual. Then I walk onto the plane and take my seat. Routine flight, right?
WRONG AGAIN. Our departure time comes and goes while we have the flight crew AND the ground staff running up and down the aisles with clickers, noting seats and clicking away. It seems that we have a missing passenger who checked bags.

You may now begin paranoid thoughts about bad guys and explosions.
The CX crew does a head count again. One missing. They identify the missing passenger and pull its bags off the plane. Sure enough the moment they finish that, the cow shows up, claiming that she got “lost” on her way to the gate.
Now a clarification on my use of the word “cow” in the last sentence. Imagine a taai-taai gone bad. Very bad. In both taste and in weight. Well, that’s how our errant passenger looked like. And as she hustled on the plane, escorted by three CX staff, the amount of dirty looks she got from the now-delayed passengers who were staring daggers would have seriously wounded her. I think the CX staff were there to protect her; if she strolled in by herself, she would have been beaten up by most of the plane.
We finally go wheels up enroute to HKG 1.5 hours late. In other words, we leave TPE when we were supposed to be landing in HKG. I’ve got stuff to do on my layover and losing close to two hours ain’t gonna help!