#3: Come Fly the Crabby-pants Skies!

What is the use of a personal column if not to berate those who piss you off?

For the past two weeks I have been dealing with the just plain mean employees at Northwest Airlines.

My initial task was simple: Get The Bossman™ on a plane to Toronto. Since The Bossman™ flies internationally a lot, he gets special tickets that he can use for domestic flights.

Unfortunately no one at Northwest was ever trained to redeem these tickets.

I’ve called to redeem them before and one of two things happens. I find the one person in a company of thousands who knows what I am talking about or the ticket agent transfers me to international flights, even though – as stated before – you can only redeem the tickets on domestic flights. When they transfer me, I usually just hang up and call back to try to get another ticket agent who (hopefully) knows what they are doing.

I have never had to call back for another ticket agent more than three times.

On the day I called to get The Bossman™ on a plane to Detroit, everyone at Northwest must have been drinking stupid juice. I had this conversation at least ten times:

“Northwest, this your totally-uninterested-in-being-friendly-and/or-helpful-in-any-way ticket agent.”

“Hi, I need to book a round trip ticket from Minneapolis to Toronto with a Visit USA Pass.”

“A what?”

“A Visit USA Pass. Your company gave it to my boss for using its services so often.”

“I don’t know what a Visit USA Pass is, even though my company produced it to ease the traveling process for our frequent fliers. I think you must be making it up.”

“Um, no. I’m really not. It’s booked in Q class and works just like any other ticket. If you could just plug in the itinerary …”

“I’ll transfer you to International travel.”

“No, I don’t need to…”

“Thank you for calling Northwest!”

The last ignorant woman actually told me I had insufficient information to book a Visit USA Pass.

“Really? I’ve done this before and this is all the information I have needed.”

“I’m sorry I need that ticket number because I’ve had a really bad day and feel like making everyone around me feel just as small as I do.”

“Well how would I have a ticket number if you haven’t issued a ticket yet?”

(This is an actual quote) “Look honey, I can’t do anything for you if you don’t have the ticket number.”

I was so frustrated I hung up on her and then screamed into my coat. Luckily, my next call to the ticketing line (strategically postponed to allow for some cool down time) was to Maureen in Tampa, FL who was so nice and helpful I just about cried.
There are nice people out there; it just takes 6 hours of phone calls to Northwest to find them.

Other than wrangling with the airlines at work and talking myself out of going to the gym, I haven’t been doing much. I’m getting very excited for Halloween. Because after Halloween comes Thanksgiving. And you all know what comes after Thanksgiving - my birthday!! One of my journalism professors told me that I should never use exclamation points in print unless it was to write the headline “Jesus is back!” but my birthday is worth an exclamation point or two, right?

I’ve also decided that because I am getting much older than I feel, I will be celebrating a birthday but NOT getting older. I know there are those of you out there who would say that we started getting older the second we were born and there is nothing we can do to stop the aging process. To you I say, “No wonder nobody wants you coming to their birthday parties. Be gone.”

To everyone else, you are only as old as you feel and since my college loans are coming due six days before my birthday, I feel like regressing a bit. So I’m living it up this year and I’m looking for fun party ideas! (Look at that, another exclamation point! I think they’re addictive!)

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