Living in SIN, frozen HEL (crazy amount of snow today) and shoe shines aside, I got a reply from EK.
Lots of blah blah and white washing but they are offering me an apology, a refund of the taxi fare and a token of good will of 25k miles.
I am somewhat underwhelmed but these things do happen. What say you? Should I just take whatever they give and move forward? EK is very good at making talking to them as painful as possible and the idea of arguing with an auto-reply email does not thrill me.
In any case, thank you everybody for comments and entertaining tangents.