It's Official!

From the irony desk...

Olympic Airlines's frequent flyer program is called Icarus.

I know this because I went through a fiasco today trying to book my flight to Israel. After spending several hours carefully and diligently comparing prices on hundreds of airlines, via hundreds of online retailers, fiddling with the dates, etc, I settled on the perfect flight, at a nice price. It was at just the right time, and only a little over budget. It was on Olympic. I thought I was almost done.

Well, halfway into the booking process, Orbitz tells me that this itinerary only offers paper tickets. Paper tickets. What the hell is a paper ticket for an airplane anyway? Isn't that a redundancy or the exact opposite of an oxymoron or something? You need ID to board the plane, and the ticket has your name on it and is not transferable, and the airline has a record of the ticket. Well, whatever, Greece is not in the 21st century yet, I figured, I can play along.

Well, it turned out it would be an extra $35 to overnight the tickets to myself via UPS, and they would require a signature, possibly my signature. That was a problem, since I'm going to LA on Friday and if UPS for some reason didn't manage to actually "overnight" it, I couldn't get it. I involved Mom at this point, and we took turns flipping out and making each other crazy. We investigated having the house-sitter sign for it, then mail it to me in LA, but that seemed to involve a troubling number of connections. We investigated having it sent to a UPS "customer service" center in LA, but after talking to several UPS representatives learned that the customer service center does not accept calls from customers and does not hold packages for customers to come pick up, unless they have a HOLD sticker on them, and sometimes not even then. We investigated having UPS deliver the tickets to my cousin in LA, but I could just see some UPS guy at the end of his shift deciding to forego the signature part and just leaving the envelope in front of my cousin's door to get stolen.

We called Orbitz to ascertain whether they could send it some other way, whether they could put a hold sticker on it, whether they could authorize someone else to sign for it, whether I could pick it up at LAX, etc. The Indians on the other end were polite and patient, speaking too softly and often incomprehensibly. They were all eager to help, but were careful not to make any guarantees, and all three Indian customer service representatives told us different information.

In the end, I coughed up an extra $200 to book on British Airways, which offers electronic tickets. Then, just as I was about to hit SUBMIT, a message popped up telling me the price had stam been reduced by $80. So in the end it hardly matters, except that I'll have a one hour layover in London instead of a 17 hour layover in Athens.

The point is...I AM REALLY GOING TO ISRAEL NOW!

Mom invented a new word today. We were talking about whether I needed a bigger memory card for my digital camera. I explained that some digital pictures take up 2 Mb, while other s take up a mere half Mb. She asked if there was a way on my camera to adjust the megabyteness of the pictures I was taking. She could be George W. Bush's speech writer.

Now I'm just hoping this labor strike will be averted before I go to Israel. Also that any impending strikes by Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran will be averted.