Flying the Friendly Skies

Last week my older son calls home from college down south and he’s sick as a dog in the middle of finals and he’s beside himself. All drama this one. He gets a cold and you’d think he has the Plague. The younger one? He could sever his carotid artery and he’d put on a band-aid and go back to his video games. Don’t get me started on his video games. He’s seen more action than David Petraeus.

Anyway, the older one? He’s in finals at a fine southern institution, Harvard on St. Charles, and he ends up in the emergency room with strep and a stomach virus and now he has to reschedule his exams. You think he’s inconvenienced? Now I have to call the airline and get him on another flight. Have to be careful here because my friend, Bill, my social networking technical guy (see photo), tells me big corporations have software that searches the Internet for their name so they can track everything people say about them and if they don’t like what you say they’ll hunt you down like a dog and sue you.

Anyway, so I call JetIndigo and I explain my son is practically dying in New Orleans, but he’s supposed to fly home on Saturday even though it’s the Sabbath, and he’s using one of my frequent flyer awards. (If you need a flight to Florida click here.) He tells me they can change the flight but it costs $100. So I say, listen, I just had to put a new oxygen sensor in my Volvo and I’m a little strapped for cash at the moment, but I’ll call back because I don’t know when my son is going to pull out if his coma and he says, oh, by the way, did you know we had a schedule change for his flight back to school? No biggie, I figure, but if I hadn’t called when exactly were you planning to tell me this? You think I have ESP? So, he says, we cancelled that flight so he’s on a flight the next day. So, I said, well that’s not a schedule change, that’s a whole other flight on a whole other day and he has to be back at school and I only booked this flight like, oh, six years ago and it’s going to cost you $100 because I have a policy that if my airline changes my flight I charge them $100 and if he wants I can have my lawyer, Goldberg, fax him my terms of service. And I tell him we’re really good customers and as a matter of fact the four of us are flying JetIndigo to Puerto Rico over Christmas (more on that next week) so they should be nice to me. Then I say, how about we make a deal?  I don’t charge you for changing his flight back and you don’t charge me for changing his flight home and we’ll be even. He says sorry, he can’t do that. It’s policy. Oooooh, policy. Like it's carved in stone like the Ten Commandments.

JetIndigo agent displays the airline's Terms of Service.

OK, so my son starts to get better and I call back to see what flights are available and I get another agent and we go through the same routine. JetIndigo won’t budge. I wait some more because my precious son still isn’t sure when he’ll be done with exams. So, I call back again when he knows and this time the agent says, of course, we’ll waive the fee since we moved your son’s flight a whole day. I didn’t even have to argue, which was kind of disappointing. And I’m like that’s interesting because I called twice before and they refused and she says all the agents have discretion to waive the fee. From this I conclude that two out of three JetIndigo agents are obsessive compulsives. And now that I know that what do you think I’m going to do next time I need something from JetIndigo? Hondle, that’s what!

While I have your attention, I’m in Barry’s Deli the other day; great brisket sandwich! Anyway, on the bulletin board there's a piece of paper says, “Jewish Joke of the Year.” This is the unabridged joke: Two Jewish women were sitting quietly, minding their own business. Perfect!