Gather round, friends, and hear the sad, sad tale of a US passport holder who tried to use OLCI with Ryanair on the first leg of a RIX-STN/LHR-LAX flight last year, en route to a wedding back home. It did not, to say the least, go well, though I prevailed in the end and did get on board.

During the OLCI process, I was able to select "United States" as my passport country and enter my passport number as well; though these things did not print out on my boarding pass - the fields were blank on the pass itself - I had no reason to believe this would be a problem, because my name and other reservation information were on the boarding pass.

In RIX, there were at the time (I haven't been back for a few months, so I'm not sure if this is still the case) two non-Schengen flight zones, A and C. Zone A is the "old" terminal, a round, ground-level building, and once proceeding through immigration, it is impossible to go back into Latvia/Schengen - literally, there are no doorknobs on the door you use to enter the zone after your passport is stamped. And crucially for me, neither the security checkpoint officer nor the Latvian immigration officer had a problem with my boarding pass, waving me through after examining my boarding pass/stamping my passport.

HOWEVER, upon boarding, the gate agent examined my boarding pass without using a bar-code scanner, and just about shouted at me that I had "lied", told me I wasn't flying today, that I would have to "go back" and purchase another ticket, and that what I had done was "illegal"!

I was nudged to the side while other passengers boarded and tried to protest. I countered with the fact that the website shouldn't have let me choose a non-EU country if it was illegal, that a passenger would have no idea what a boarding pass is "supposed" to look like, that the security and immigration personnel would have told me my boarding pass was "illegal", and, most importantly, that it was physically impossible for me to go back as there were no doorknobs!

I also said that I'd miss officiating my best friend's wedding in California if I missed this flight (sort of true - I was only doing a reading), and that my reservation was valid - it's not like I forged a boarding pass or was trying to get on a flight I hadn't paid for.

A colleague of the gate agent's came over, got the gate agent's side of the story from her in Latvian, again accused me of "lying", and told me that we would be "going back through immigration". At first, she tried to lead me to the exit immigration desk, though the non-openable doors (which, once she, too, realized had no doorknobs, she was able to get opened by knocking).

The exit immigration officer, who I had had a short, friendly chat with before, opened the door. He looked at me and seemingly remembered me (I'd only gone past his desk an hour or so before), and after he and the gate agent spoke to each other, rather heatedly, in Latvian, said to me, in English (which the gate agent didn't bother to do!) that 1) it was impossible for him to re-admit me to the country as his desk did not have the right entry stamps and 2) (I was amazed that he said this) that he thought should be allowed to fly because I had everything in order except the printout of my passport number on the airline's paper, that my trip was absolutely "legal" since US citizens are allowed six months without a visa into the UK anyway! Perhaps he was wrong, or just simplifying things for me, the Obviously Clueless Foreigner - does the UK require APIS information? - but at least I had one person there in my corner.

At this point, I grew hopeful - if they wouldn't let me back into the country without a stamp, perhaps I'd become enough of a problem that they'd just let me on the plane and forget anything had happened.

The gate agent's colleague then said, frustrated at the situation but slowly realizing that I was becoming a liability, and without consulting with anyone else in person or on the radio, that a bus (!) would come to take me to entry immigration. I protested, and said that we needed to resolve this right here, and that I wasn't going to leave the gate area unless the airline showed me, in print in the Conditions of Carriage, where, exactly, it said that the format of my boarding pass alone - regardless of the fact that I still had a legal, paid-for reservation - was absolute, total grounds for denying me boarding, and that, in fact, they were obliged to deny me boarding. (This took some doing, but I had sufficiently slowed down boarding by reducing their boarding activities to just one person checking passes, making announcements, and periodically sneering at me, so it's not like I was exactly causing a delay; there were still a good 35 minutes before departure time and we were all getting on buses anyway.)

A supervisor was called, and she produced the Conditions of Carriage, which did, in fact, say that online check-in was only available to EU/EEA passport holders, but which also said something where being a English teacher abroad finally saved me some money:

I thought fast: how could I manipulate this legalese to get them to let me aboard?

I went for the grammar angle. "OK. See these words here? You know, 'reserve the right to' doesn't mean you have to prevent me from flying. It just means 'you can if you want to', right?"

One of the gate agents smiled and nodded, understanding the legal limbo the phrase created - victory close at hand now! - but the supervisor didn't seem to get the fact that she had the power to use her forces for good and save my trip! I tried to restate things more simply, in a more pleading voice:

"You can let me on the plane. This (I pointed to the phrase, the gate agent nodding along with me now) says you can let me on the plane. Please let me make this trip - my friend's wedding won't happen without it!"

Finally, the supervisor relented. "This is a big problem, but if you promise that you won't EVER do this again, you can fly today." And she smiled!

Of course, I promised.

I walked out the door toward the first bus shaking a bit - I was amazed that all of this had happened in just five or ten minutes, but I didn't begin to calm down until we took off - would they come running after us on the tarmac? And it wasn't until I got to the non-EU line at Stansted, showed the incredibly nice immigration officer my onward ticket from Heathrow, got one of those big, friendly "LEAVE TO ENTER FOR SIX MONTHS EMPLOYMENT AND RECOURSE TO PUBLIC FUNDS PROHIBITED" stamps, and got on the bus that I actually relaxed.

Moral of the story: don't use OLCI if you aren't an EU passport holder, because you just never know who your gate agent is going to be!