Despite our antics, there was a thinly veiled attempt to justify this quick sojourn to the desert. Some of you may be aware that the Dubai Do is on at the end of June. And sadly, I am the sucker who volunteered to organize this party.

But if we get 40-people to attend (as is already indicated by our confirmed list), I will simply be amazed. Actually, I’ll be delighted. I will probably even offer to buy everyone a drink.

Ung1 and I decided that we would set off under the cover of darkness for the sandpit to check out the hotels, talk with Emirates and generally goof off for 2-days.

But I need to wind back the tape so to speak. Just a little bit.

FT is littered with stories surrounding “mistake” fares. But they are myths to most of us. Simply unattainable to the ordinary person. However, this is FT. Ordinary is not a part of our vocabulary.

This routing was clearly an error on EK’s part. And before you all rush off to check what you’re doing this weekend, and look up on Google Maps, just where the hell Male is located, I bring you bad news. The fare/routing combo we purchased is no longer available.

So you can stop sucking in your stomach in front of the bathroom mirror, yelling out to your significant other asking “honey, do I look fat in this swimsuit?”

Anyway.

Obviously alarm bells started ringing deep in the bowels of EK’s inventory management department when the F cabins started to fill up on the CMB-DXB-MLE legs faster than a pub with a sign out the front which reads “free beer”.

Or something like this.

And the person who made the mistake is probably now working the ramp, at a regional airport in Uzbekistan.

When Ung1 and I were first talking to each other about the fare (and the thread which had started on the EK forum as a result of such a find), we immediately agreed that this could not be true.

As a semi-joke, I told him to book it. For both of us. This was mistake number one.

You should never give a much younger person, (and someone with a freshly minted degree in computer engineering), any sort of command which involves a credit card, and buying something online. Because you will lose. Everytime.

So with confirmation email number one safely received in my inbox, I challenged Ung1 to see whether or not he could pull off the same booking again. Only a couple of weeks later.

Minutes later and bam. Another confirmation email from one of EK’s servers buried in a lot of sand somewhere.

So for the princely sum of $1400, we had 2 round-trips from CMB to MLE (via Dubai). Each. We’d earn close on 80,000 Skywards miles. And receive 34,000 tier miles. And 8-sectors in F. And multiple visits to the F lounge in Dubai, T3.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for a start, we both had to get to CMB. Because we both live in SIN. Easy enough though as the flight which runs from SIN-CMB on EK, then continues on to DXB. You don’t even have to get off the flight. Its even the same flight number.

So we book those flights as well. By this stage, we have airline PNR’s up the wazoo. But we would have to suck it up and travel from SIN to CMB in Y. As in Coach. As in e-c-o-n-o-m-y. Because that return ticket from SIN to CMB in Y was exactly the same price as the whole CMB-MLE-CMB return in F.

It’s ok if you’re confused. So am I. And I’m the one travelling.

Monday rolls around and we agree to meet at Changi. Our flight departs at a rather rude hour of the morning. Something like 12.55am Tuesday. I think Ung1 slept at Changi the day before he was so excited. And truth be told, this was my first revenue flight in EK First. Ever. So I was rather looking forward to the trip as well.

Check-in was not as straight forward as we would have hoped.

The poor hapless contract staff person was perplexed. The process to check both of us in on 2 separate locators took the best part of 25-minutes. But we finally worked it out. Or rather, she did. Ung1, to my astonishment, checks his bag all the way in from SIN to MLE. I had a quiet chuckle. The confidence of the younger generation amazes me. I thought to myself that his chances of ever seeing that bag again were about the same as me scoring a date with Blake Lively’s mother.

Or something like this.

The 3hr flight from SIN to CMB was uneventful. Load was light, so we scored a row to ourselves down the back. Tried to get some sleep before we were allowed to walk forward to the promised land. To where the Dom was chilling. To where, as my daughter says, "the Big Seats are".

The Y pursar working that sector was confused. As was every other EK staff member we ran into during our trip. Why were we holding 2 different boarding passes he wanted to know. More importantly, why were we holding one which read Y and another which read F? On the same flight.

When you land in Columbo, if you’re heading on to Dubai, you don’t even have to get off. The cleaners come on, the staff run away and you just sit there for an hour. Except for us.

We got to do the airline “reverse walk of shame”. From our lowly Y seats to EK’s finest.

As we settled in to our new row 1 environment, something caught my eye. A young person, who looked no older than twenty, sat down in 1A. Then he started taking pictures of the suite and his surroundings. He was busier than a Japanese tourist at their first midget tossing competition. He even took a picture of the champagne glass.

That is not the behavior of a rational person I said to myself. Only an FT’er would do such a thing.

Turns out that this person wasn't an FT'er as we would later discover. But he had read about the fare on the EK Forum.

Crikey...now it was getting interesting.