Farrago Gets a (Rare) Break

For anyone who has not had the opportunity, international travel generally ranges from unpleasant to grueling. Most flights abroad are crowded, full of people who, in everyday life may not be so rude, but tossed together into a sardine can with 250 other people from a dozen cutures, become crazed serial killers if someone looks at them the wrong way. And so it was with a mild dread that I approached the ticket counter with two co-workers to begin our trip to Berlin.

One of the co-workers - let's call him co-worker #1 - is a really attentive guy, always on top of details and ready to rope something in if it threatens to get away, so it didn't surprise anyone when, back in 2002, he missed the misspelling of his last name on his brand new PASSPORT, of all things! He had to get an amendment page inserted in the back of the passport to make it legal, showing the correct spelling.

The ticket agent took our passports to begin checking us in, and she immediately encountered a problem. Co-worker #1's reservation was nowhere to be found. She checked for mine and found it no problem, even noticing that I had been upgraded to business class to make room in coach! Once I heard that, I was really looking forward to the flight! But co-worker #1's issue seemed to threaten to delay us. The ticket agent, who I think was either not very competent, or was just too new to be able to deal with such a problem, and who thought co-worker #1's reservation had been lost in the system, decided to make it right by taking the three of us - and our mountain of luggage - off of the original flight and putting us on an all-business-class flight to Düsseldorf, where we would connect to Berlin. She told us it was an Airbus A320, which in normal configuration carries 100- 120 people, configured now to carry only 48!! It had twelve rows of business class seats four across. After encountering further problems getting our original reservations cancelled the ticket agent then discovered why she couldn't find co-worker #1's reservation... she had used the misspelling from the ID page of his passport to look for his reservation, but now she saw the correct spelling of his name. When she saw it I thought we were going to be screwed out of the cush plane, but in her dedication to positive customer service - and, no doubt, her dread of going back through all that computer hassle - she kept us on the new flight!

This marks the first time that a co-worker's fuck-up has ever resulted in a BETTER outcome for me. But I was already uprgraded to business class on the original flight, so I guess I was in a win-win. The greatest beneficiary of the snafu was co-worker #2, who has no status on any airline, and who would otherwise have been crammed in with the serial killers and their whiny children.

Despite our great fortune, however, I didn't get the sleep I had hoped for, and my cold hasn't let up. It hasn't quite blossomed into the bird-flu, but it hasn't let up. Just in case you resented that I got off too easy.