This is not much fun. I should have known. There were signs. Like when I tried logging in to Air France and my reservation number was not recognized. That it was on a printed receipt did not matter at all -- the all-knowing machine said there was no such number...
So I called customer service. After the requisite menu maze and endless terrible music, friendly, cheery Sybil came on the line and asked how she could help. I said I would like to reserve seats for our upcoming flight. Quite reasonably she wanted my reservation number which I read off to her using the international aviation alphabet. It felt good to deal with a real person. Sybil sounded just like the person who could solve all my problems. Too bad she turned on the awful music for me though. But not of too long. She was back in a minute, greeting me "Mr. Dominic!" "No, I said, that is not the name" So she read back the reservation number to me, perfectly correctly. I confirmed the number. But it brings up Mr. Dominic! Said Sybil. I began doubting that Sybil was the answer to all my problems... I explained that I had a printed listing of my reservation, with the number, with my name, the itinerary, the whole nine yards. Sybil was sympathetic. She said she would try to get my record using the reservation details. So I spelled her my name, and spelled it again, and again, several times. Her command of the aviation alphabet seemed to be deteriorating. I gave her the date, the time, the flight number, the airport of departure -- everything. In response she turned on the music. The same awful song as before. I am exaggerating. It was not a song. Not in my vocabulary. No recognizable melody, just mindless screeching and thumping. I was wondering if Sybil was taking revenge... After several minutes she was back, thanking me for my patience. She found my record! She was the woman of my dreams after all! She explained that the mixup must have happened because our Air France flight was actually operated by Delta. They had merged, but their computer systems sometimes got "confused". Of course. Silly computers. I thanked her for having figured that out. Now we could get to business and book some seats. Sybil said, of course. And |
saying that she would pull up the seating plan, she dropped me back into the same non-song. I turned the volume down to slow down the hearing loss the screeching was clearly causing me. After a much longer wait than before, Sybil again thanked me for my patience. What a perfectly polite lady! Veritable old school! Bu t she had bad news. She could not pull up the seating plan. The seats seemed to be blocked. She could not explain why. She suggested helpfully that I try to book seats in a few days when I do my online check-in.
I thanked her. What else could I do? It was not her fault. And she was so polite. The day before departure I logged in again to print out boarding passes. This time the machine did find my record. Things were looking up! Bugs had been fixed! Clicking through layers and layers and layers I finally got to the boarding pass button and gratefully clicked on it. After no more than a mili-second a banner came up surrounded by a red border: "Online checkin will be available 30 bourse before departure". I checked the time - just before noon. Our flight was at 9:30 am the next day, about 22 hours away by my estimation. So was Air France's clock running several hours late? Or what on earth? I logged out and logged in again. This must be a silly glitch I fell into. Alas, same result... So, Customer Service, once again. You won't believe this, but they still played the very same screeching non-song. Interminably. I had a nasty foreboding... After a very long time an agent picked up. This one had more trouble finding my record than Sybil had some days before. And she put me on hold ( or on musical torture) for much longer too. Eventually she came back sounding triumphant. She had it figured out! Our first leg, from San Jose to LA, was operated by Alaska Air, so of course Air France could not issue boarding passes. She sounded like I should have known that. On my itinerary the flight had an Air France flight number. No matter... I guess the banner message, saying that they needed 30 hours, was just another method of psychological torture to provide variety from the physical music torture... To make a long story a little shorter, we had a long layover in LA, an unpleasant 10-hour flight to Paris, where we missed our connection to Montpellier. Another 6-hour wait for the next flight. All told, some 27 hours door to door. Getting there was much, much less than even a tenth of the fun. |