Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Sugar Crash

Evil Dolan the Bad Daddy stole his poor child's Halloween candy and brought it into work. Apparently all the sugar makes children spastic, and he figured she would be too young too notice that it was all gone in the morning.

What my esteemed colleague never once considered was the effect that all that sugar might have on the staff planners in my office. Because I snacked, and snacked, and snacked. Won't you crash from all the sugar? the ever rational Tiger asked. Nah, I said. I don't think so.

And I didn't, until this morning, when I woke up without any functioning brain cells. Literally, I think they've all been overloaded and have shut down. Kaput, nada, nothing is functioning today.

As if I need brain cells right now anyways. I've been doing the monkey dance for the ambulance chasers all week. Or rather, the past two days. Frakkin' lawyers, I can't even get my work done but I have to jump through the dozen useless hoops they create with their petitions.

At night the monkey dance continued with the airlines. I called American to book a trip to Europe with my miles. But, again, I can't use them. Or rather, I can use them - on December 10. That's it. That is the one day they will let me use my miles to get to Europe. I can use them on almost any day to return, now. But, the computer-generated receptionist explained to me, it wouldn't be fair to let people use their miles over the holidays when so many travelers are paying full price.

The website says I can use them anytime, I claimed the right to use them anytime, the cyborg on the other line denied me that right. Can I upgrade? I asked. She processed that, and her algorithms then reset to perky as she told me not to bother, that I should just save them and accumulate even more miles.

On to Cheap Tickets. Certainly they could help. But Rome, mia Roma, was going to cost way too much. I searched, poked, played with the internet until it spat out a ticket that sounded too good to be true: $650 round trip to Munich.

I jumped. The computer crashed. I tried again. The computer froze. And in Round Three of the Monkey Quadrille I went at it with the Cheap Ticket agent. Round and round we spun, as tickets appeared and disappeared, extraneous fees popping up as fast as I could smack them down, until, finally, dizzy and ready to collapse, we settled on $780. More than I wanted to pay, but within range, and realistically it's a pretty damn awesome price.

So. Non piu Roma, but Jah Munich! The flights even offer me one extra day in Europe and one extra in Cairo, so I can't complain. Though complaining sure feels good.

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