Changing flights

Most of the billions of visitors will probably not be interested in this story, so please skip it. ;-)

I have just spent 4 hours on phone with Continental Airlines. Sometimes their system starts to beep instead of responding, sometimes the woman is not quite able to find the right flight and after 2 hours of discussions and silence that leads nowhere, my telephone runs out of battery.

Eventually another woman told me that there is a chance that the flight will be changed, as I was originally promised because they were not able to sell me a round trip ticket that would last for more than 9 months. But I will have to spend a few more hours by calling them tomorrow, and even if I am lucky, I will have to pick the new air ticket from the Logan Airport.

Still, the Continental Airlines flight for $1100 from Boston via Newark and Frankfurt to Prague takes 22 hours (twenty-two hours; it's not a typo) and there is no way how to change this "detail"; it was the best flight that they could offer me in August. If you count the events summarized above as one unit of stress, in the last two years or so I had to undergo about 93 units of stress; yes, of course, the number was chosen because of the United 93 flight. Although I predicted most of them because they were largely inevitable, I was not rational enough to have acted to avoid these things.

It's probably the highest time for me to act rationally. Having less than 7 weeks to buy an international air ticket is a problem. Being forced to depend on immigration bureaucrats who may give the visa after a year of hassle is a serious problem. A timebomb inside an institution in the form of insane politically correct radicals waiting to explode is a very serious problem. Let me censor the remaining 90 similar and potentially even more serious problems because it is likely that I am the only person among the readers of the blog who could survive even seeing the list. :-)

This article is also a note for me that I must spend Tuesday afternoon by calling them again. ;-)