So I'm, trying to book two Award travel tickets (25,000 miles apiece) and I'm having the toughest time.

I have 21,000 miles in the IML account, and my friend transfer over 20,000 miles for a grand total of 41,000 miles. Simple math tells me I'm 9,000 miles short, no problem, I can transfer it in from Citibank, no sweat.

Now after my friends mileages appear in my account, a "friendly reminder" magically appeared, poorly translated English:

Friendly Reminder: The transferred mileage cannot be combined with the nominee’s own mileage or any mileage transferred by a 3rd party.

So according to this "reminder", even though I have 41,000 miles in my account (with 9000) to transfer in, is there a remote possibility that I can't redeem a single award ticket with this?

Bucket 1: 21000 of my own miles
Bucket 2: 20000 of miles from my friend
Bucket 3: 9000 miles from Citibank (pending)
= 50,000 miles = 0 tickets I can book?

W...T...H.... ??

Barring any random trial and error, is there anything I can do here?