Its been a rather stressful 24 hours. I did massive amounts of shopping yesterday morning, after a bumpy and sleepless night on the bus from Lago Agrio. I sent some stuff back home to the folks, and also had a lovely seafood meal with crab. I get to the airport, check in everything fine, but at the boarding gates, they call my name on the intercom, and tells me I´m not allowed to board the plane until I produce my paper ticket. I didn´t have a paper ticket, travel agent (damn you Newtown Student Flights!) told me the tickets were electronic and didn´t give me anything for the Ecuador-Madrid-London flight. So, 4 hours I spent in the Iberia office, calling all sorts of people, to see if I can get a ticket number. It´s really screwed up. The only thing they can think of, is for me to say I´ve lost the ticket, go tell the police and get a denounciation report, and pay for a ticket re-issue. Meanwhile, my flight was jetting off to Madrid without me.
I was very angry about it all, having to pay for another day in Quito, wasting another day running around getting shit organised that´s not at all my fault. The guy I talked to at the student flight centre even had the guts to joke about it: Oh, you just need to buy another flight, pay a cancellation fee, and hopefully we can give you some of your money back ... it´ll just about 1 grand maybe.
Right now I´m trying to decide if I want to chase this up, follow the paper trail so they say, to see if I can prove that Student Flights never gave me the paper ticket at all. And the annoying thing is I had sent them emails trying to get a reservation number and they never responded at all! I feel particularly indignified when they won´t admit any responsibility and in return accuse me of having lost the ticket. Screw them I say! I´m going to start an Anti-Agents of All Types club, who´s in!?!??!
Today I went to do some shopping, thinking maybe retail therapy will ease the hurt a little. It didn´t. God I´ve put on lots of weight whilst I´ve been travelling! Will have to do something about it when I get to London.
