Return Flight Nightmare

Well I have once again lived up to my rep for being me. Some how I always seem to say the wrong (or dumbest) things, screw things up, or humiliate myself beyond believe. I have come to terms with this. On the bright side, I always make people laugh but usually at my own expense.

Last night I experienced another one of a kind, story-telling incident. Here is the short version. Everything started when I arrived at the Victoria airport with some CARCNET conference comrades (Connie, Arthur, Brian, and Chris). When I got there I manual tried to get my boarding pass from one of the ATM like machines except it kept saying that my flight wasn’t until ~4 hours later, which was wrong because it was supposedly scheduled to leave an hour later. With a bounding heart I expected the worst and approached a lady at the counter and explained my problem. Five minutes later she found my information and proceeded to tell me the bad news! I was not scheduled to leave Victoria that day (29 Oct 2006) but on the 26th of November (2006) flight. With this news, mine and all my friends’ mouths dropped, making us speechless. It turned out that their flight was booked solid, so I was going to have to fly out the next day. I was planning to spend the next 24 hours in the airport but everyone was trying to tell me to go to a hotel. The truth was, I couldn’t afford it. I had just paid more than $80.00 to change flights, bringing my bank account balance closer to $0. I could see on everybody’s long faces that they felt bad for me, probably because I looked like I was going to break down and cry (mainly due to the acute stress and lack of sleep I was experiencing). Arthur and Connie were the best though. Arthur offered to pick me up the next day and Connie tried to sell her ticket so that she could stay with me. That would have been a lot of fun, except that she wasn’t able to. In the end, the lady came through for me. First she got me on a 7:00 pm flight the next day (because it was cheaper) but then she put me on a standby for a 9:20 am flight that same day. That was the plan until another worker over heard our predicament and suggested that we take a connecting flight…which was brilliant. I ended up taking a flight a half our later than everyone else. By the end of the night, or should I say the beginning of the morning, I arrived in Edmonton around 12:30. The good news about this ordeal was that I was home; the bad news was that Edmonton was covered with snow!