About those plans to find an apartment...
So, today I decided that it was time I checked and confirmed my flights. Way back in August I went in person to the Air Canada office in Lima, Peru to change my flight home to Canada so that I could have a layover in Toronto to find an apartment to live in before I start work in January. "No problem" said the lady in Lima -- it´ll cost you $175 (which I thought was highway robbery, but whatever) but here you go, here´s a printout with your new confirmed flights, and you pay the fee at the airport in Buenos Aires. "Really?" I asked. "Yup, you don´t pay it here." Okay.
Fast forward to today. Online my flights haven´t changed. I´m still, according to Air Canada, leaving next Monday night and flying almost directly to Vancouver, with only an hour and a half between flights (I´m good at finding apartments, but this is beyond even me). Clearly this won´t do, so I went to the call centre and the nice man gave me a cell phone (I´m still in Uruguay, so my own phone doesn´t work) and says it´ll be 50 cents a minute (ouch.) to call long distance, despite the fact that in theory I´m calling the toll free number. Whatever. Anyway. The first misnamed customer service representative can´t speak English well enough to translate my reservation code correctly and in fact we end up speaking in Spanish until I get pissed off. She puts me on hold (having muttered under her breath that I had a bad attitude!) and the call gets cut. And her story is that the tickets weren´t changed because I didn´t pay for them yet. Mm hmm... Lovely.
Round two. The next person I speak to is a guy named Gustavo who actually seems to be trying to help... but when he puts me on hold, the call gets cut, again.
Round three. I spend fifteen minutes on hold, waiting for someone to answer, and the call gets cut. I give up and give the nice man his cell phone back saying that I need a land line. He gives me the office land line and I try again. Another five minutes on hold and I get person number three who tells me that a) the tickets were never changed and b) that the *couldn´t* have been changed because my seat doesn´t belong to Air Canada and c) that Gustavo is now helping someone else. I beg your pardon? Oh, see, the seats were sold to the travel agent who sold me the seat, so they no longer are within Air Canada´s capacity to change them.
Riiiight. So what about the fact that I have a printout from the Air Canada office in Lima that shows that not only could they change my ticket, but DID? Oh, that was a mistake. And? And nothing. In fact, unhelpful person number three actually suggested that if I had a problem with her response I could GO TO LIMA to complain, instead of bothering her in Mexico City. My response was to explain that I had no idea why I´d been transferred to Mexico City as I´d called the Uruguay number, because in fact URUGUAY is where I am currently located. As such, going to LIMA is not an option.
You can imagine by this point my voice might have raised a little (though I did NOT yell) and the Americans in the phone place using the internet looked sympathetic... and the nice man with the expensive cell phone told me that "really, Christmas in Uruguay is very nice..." at which point I came very close to crying.
The upshot seems to be, however, that I am stuck with my original tickets. I think perhaps had I managed to keep Gustavo that things might have been different, but little miss Mexico City had no interest in helping me. In fact, when I said that I wanted to speak to her supervisor, she put me on hold... and you guessed it, the call got cut. At that point I cut my losses, paid my exorbitant phone bill and left. In fact, I couldn´t even pay the whole phone bill because I didn´t have enough Uruguayan currency left. I told the nice cell phone man I´d be back with the rest and on my way back from the bank ran into him on the street... whereupon he told me not to worry about the rest of the bill and if he could do anything to help, please let him know. At which point I almost cried again. Sometimes people being nice breaks you faster, you know?
So yeah, back to Buenos Aires tomorrow where I've booked a hostel in San Telmo until Monday. I am telling myself that there must be a reason for this. Perhaps because my university is still on strike and I am therefore not going home to the employment I planned to have? Perhaps because something dreadful was going to happen on the plane on Wednesday? Who the hell knows...
PS But to put my woes in perspective -- the guy who just moved into my dorm here got kidnapped in Bolivia and had all his stuff taken... so really, a few extra days here? Could be a hell of a lot worse...
Fast forward to today. Online my flights haven´t changed. I´m still, according to Air Canada, leaving next Monday night and flying almost directly to Vancouver, with only an hour and a half between flights (I´m good at finding apartments, but this is beyond even me). Clearly this won´t do, so I went to the call centre and the nice man gave me a cell phone (I´m still in Uruguay, so my own phone doesn´t work) and says it´ll be 50 cents a minute (ouch.) to call long distance, despite the fact that in theory I´m calling the toll free number. Whatever. Anyway. The first misnamed customer service representative can´t speak English well enough to translate my reservation code correctly and in fact we end up speaking in Spanish until I get pissed off. She puts me on hold (having muttered under her breath that I had a bad attitude!) and the call gets cut. And her story is that the tickets weren´t changed because I didn´t pay for them yet. Mm hmm... Lovely.
Round two. The next person I speak to is a guy named Gustavo who actually seems to be trying to help... but when he puts me on hold, the call gets cut, again.
Round three. I spend fifteen minutes on hold, waiting for someone to answer, and the call gets cut. I give up and give the nice man his cell phone back saying that I need a land line. He gives me the office land line and I try again. Another five minutes on hold and I get person number three who tells me that a) the tickets were never changed and b) that the *couldn´t* have been changed because my seat doesn´t belong to Air Canada and c) that Gustavo is now helping someone else. I beg your pardon? Oh, see, the seats were sold to the travel agent who sold me the seat, so they no longer are within Air Canada´s capacity to change them.
Riiiight. So what about the fact that I have a printout from the Air Canada office in Lima that shows that not only could they change my ticket, but DID? Oh, that was a mistake. And? And nothing. In fact, unhelpful person number three actually suggested that if I had a problem with her response I could GO TO LIMA to complain, instead of bothering her in Mexico City. My response was to explain that I had no idea why I´d been transferred to Mexico City as I´d called the Uruguay number, because in fact URUGUAY is where I am currently located. As such, going to LIMA is not an option.
You can imagine by this point my voice might have raised a little (though I did NOT yell) and the Americans in the phone place using the internet looked sympathetic... and the nice man with the expensive cell phone told me that "really, Christmas in Uruguay is very nice..." at which point I came very close to crying.
The upshot seems to be, however, that I am stuck with my original tickets. I think perhaps had I managed to keep Gustavo that things might have been different, but little miss Mexico City had no interest in helping me. In fact, when I said that I wanted to speak to her supervisor, she put me on hold... and you guessed it, the call got cut. At that point I cut my losses, paid my exorbitant phone bill and left. In fact, I couldn´t even pay the whole phone bill because I didn´t have enough Uruguayan currency left. I told the nice cell phone man I´d be back with the rest and on my way back from the bank ran into him on the street... whereupon he told me not to worry about the rest of the bill and if he could do anything to help, please let him know. At which point I almost cried again. Sometimes people being nice breaks you faster, you know?
So yeah, back to Buenos Aires tomorrow where I've booked a hostel in San Telmo until Monday. I am telling myself that there must be a reason for this. Perhaps because my university is still on strike and I am therefore not going home to the employment I planned to have? Perhaps because something dreadful was going to happen on the plane on Wednesday? Who the hell knows...
PS But to put my woes in perspective -- the guy who just moved into my dorm here got kidnapped in Bolivia and had all his stuff taken... so really, a few extra days here? Could be a hell of a lot worse...
Comments