Rolling With the Punches

Alert readers will notice that although quite lovely, this is not the Grand Cayman Islands. (It’s a long and throughly modern story full of bureaucratic incompetence, ghastly customer service, and plenty of old fashioned greed.) But first I should point out the obvious truth that Pam and I are lucky to be here in this wonderful condo in North Myrtle Beach for the next several days celebrating 40 years together. The symbolism isn’t lost on us that 40 years of marriage doesn’t happen without a lot of improvisation, much of our happiness together has been about making the most out of busted plans.

Ok, so I suppose I should first admit that all of the trouble started with a mistake made by…me. I was the one who booked our Grand Cayman adventure. I found the resort and booked the flights on Expedia—which will henceforth be referred to as…X. This has always been my job in our marriage. I am the adventure planner. I come up with crazy schemes and then run them by Pam who is either thrilled or silent. Anyway, she was happy with my Cayman idea, but on Tuesday morning happened to mention in passing that she had noticed that our names on the airline tickets were Doug Dunnevant, and Pam Dunnevant, which do not match exactly our names as written on our passports—Douglas Lee Dunnevant and Pamela Jean Dunnevant. “What is your plan for fixing this before we leave,” she asked? Since people in customs look askance at any discrepancy in names on travel documents, I promised her I would fix it right away.

I called X, explained the issue to a thickly accented customer service employee who immediately informed me that in order to change these handful of letters on our airline tickets was going to cost us $250 per ticket. In addition, the tickets would have to be reissued and unfortunately our original flights were no longer available at the original cost, and additional $190 per ticket would be required and oh by the way, the new flights would take 9 and a half hours and require two connections, instead of 5 hours and one connection. 

The following two hours were spent speaking with four separate customer service Nazi’s at both X and American Airlines. In between trying to understand these indecipherable Indian dialects, I was forced to listen to electronic music which must have been composed by a couple of menopausal women in the middle of heat flashes, the kind of humans in so much discomfort that they decided to create the absolute worst music ever written, then put it in a loop and make frustrated customers listen to it for ten minutes at a time until the entire world implodes on itself. At the end of my two hour phone call which managed to set back customer service at least 25 years, I made the executive decision to cut my losses and cancel the Grand Caymans. I was refunded the resort costs and now am in possession of a rather large credit for future flights with American Airlines.

I was devastated by these events, mad at myself for forgetting about the name thing having to match passports, and feeling like a failure for screwing up our anniversary trip. But, I was not about to give up. We had a dog sitter all set up—we had to go somewhere!! 

Somewhere ended up being here, and we intend to make the best of it. This happens to be pretty close to the place where we honeymooned 40 years ago. The entry code for the door to the condo happens to be the last four digits of my cell phone number. Coincidence? 

….I think not.