1. ok, i love oranges in any form... but that i won the bet with my brother about the outcome of the presidential election, annoys me. granted, i have a very dark sense of humor...
2. trying to book on the web a return trip LAX-BRN or LAX-ZRH for my son is costing me some nerves: either i have the right site and the wrong credit card (drawn on a swiss bank account) or i have the right credit card, but the site will not let me book from LAX, or as with bonus miles on KLM, the ticket gets issued in paper and it can not be sent to the USA by the airline (time for snail mail)??? fuckadelik! i have gotten so used to e-tickets that the thought of a paper ticket is a nightmare!
i ought to be zen about this: on my last trip to the US booked on the portuguese site of KLM and paid with a swiss credit card, got issued an e-ticket. i got to the lisbon airport at some ungodly hour for a 6am flight to amsterdam, and then the check-in clerk discovers that the name on my US passport and the ticket are not the same (i kept my father's name on my US passport, and US regulations require that the names be the same) and this started a process that had 3 clerks working like mad at a computer terminal to get my ticket name to match my passport's name. they had to, for some reason i do not care to understand, go from the e-ticket to a paper ticket and then back to the e-ticket and it seemed that there were about 20'000 code fields that they had to change manually to accomplish this feat. consequence of such exercise was a lot of intercom exchanges between check-in and gate to hold the plane while the "e" paper work was getting done! i have travelled a bit while as a management consultant, but this was the first time the gate had to wait for me, i was the last one on the plane and i got all the dirty looks that the last one does get.
none of this makes any sense, i am going to sleep. in the morning this will look a bit clearer.
