Speaking of reconfirming, Lex and I had "fun" a few days ago in Glasgow. On arriving from AMS, I'd asked for, and supposedly gotten, a swap from the ~10am return to AMS to the ~11am one. The not-KLM desk agent said it was done. Should have been no problem, right? Huh!

Luckily, having had such a wonderful experience in supposed business seats (not) with our inbound AMS-GLA flight, the day before the return, we remembered - after we were already on the M8 heading for Edinburgh - that we wanted to make sure we had seats together, so that at least in our potential misery we would be together. We came within a hair of saying, Oh it'll be OK, but instead, we turned around and went back to the airport.

TWO AND A HALF HOURS, and a shocking number of £s for parking, LATER, we left the airport profoundly grateful that we'd decided to check. Because when we asked to have seats assigned, we discovered that not only did I not have a seat, any seat, on Any flight to Amsterdam the following day, but I also seemed not to have my WBC seat AMS-DTW either.

We only discovered this after waiting over 30 minutes to see a sight of any of the not-KLM personnel at the airport - they were all in a "meeting" according to the Mystery Man who started helping us. He seemed to work for the airport itself, as a sort of homicide prevention officer. We only ultimately got the problem fixed by finally being given a phone number for Worldperks in the UK by the not-KLM person whose best helpful suggestion to that point had been to buy a new ticket to AMS. Trying to ring the public "Northwest Airlines" number, which we'd actually thought of on our own, got an endless busy signal.

The WP UK phone number rings straight through to MN. That was a blessing, because apparently my lack of reservation wasn't a trivial problem. I'd of course thought it would be a couple of keystrokes and things would be fine. But my seats really had been cancelled, probably unintentionally by the helpful non-KLM folks the week before, and it took the phone agent several consultations (with tech people? supervisors? the Pentagon? who knows?) and half an hour to make it right.

Thus we actually made our flights on the day as planned. Our diligence had played merry hell with our plans for one of two free days, but was definitely worth it. The most tooth-grinding moment of all did come when the twittiot not-KLM person explained that Of Course, one must Always Reconfirm... since the Homicide Prevention guy was in the vicinity, I did not leap the counter and strangle her on the spot, but it was tempting.