A Question Of Convenience

Noi and I spent a good two-and-a-half to three hours over the last two evenings, in both cases after ten o' clock, which is extremely late for me, attempting to book tickets on-line for a trip to England this December. We eventually succeeded, but not before having to make three very long phone calls to our credit card company and one to the airline itself. Thus something that we assumed would take around twenty minutes, as it has done in the past, turned into quite a saga.

At the heart of the problem lay, ironically, what the credit card company claimed were its attempts to protect my interests as a 'consumer' by making it almost impossible to actually use the card they had given me to secure my 'delightful experience' in the 'privileged world' to which they feel I have a right to belong. Much as I enjoy a nice bit of irony I found it difficult to really enter into the spirit of the thing, owing to the late hour(s) at which all this transpired.

The one saving grace for the credit card co. was the fact that the customer service representatives, which is what I think they call themselves, really performed heroically to try and deal with the mess that company policy had created. Fascinatingly, though, I couldn't help but notice that in their attempts to stay on script the blame for the initial fiasco was laid on me with a downright untruth. I was informed that the 'merchant' had declined the card, with the implication I had done something wrong in the submission, despite my certain knowledge that it was the credit card people themselves who had declined it. I knew this because they told me so directly and had reinforced this by announcing it on-line. It's to the credit, pun intended, of the reps that they quickly accepted the truth of what had happened, even though it was a bit embarrassing to have the clueless customer tell them what their company had actually done.

It's now all over - almost; I still need to make sure the airline don't charge for a set of tickets they are not going to give me in addition to the ones we've got - but it's been interesting to reflect on how much more relaxed life used to be when you didn't need to conduct so much of it on the telephone.