Jackylad

So many things.

Left my passport in on a car hire photocopier and didn't realise until I was at the airport due to fly home;
Managed to get bitten by a wild monkey (my fault, I approached him) and ended up having to get a tetanus shot in a Thai hospital;
Overdosed on peanut satay in a restautant and nearly missed a flight because I couldn't leave the bathroom;
Went to a cashpoint straight after clearing passport security and left my debit card in the slot, didn't realise until I got to the hotel;
Fractured my big toe by stubbing in on a sunlounger;
Had to drive a hire car for six hours to get back to the airport with said fractured toe, a crash course in left foot braking;
Thought I was ordering 20 individual wantons and spring rolls for a party of five, but inadvertantly ordered 20 plates of each due to communications breakdown.

That's just off the top of my head.

SayItAintSo

Hmmm.. Remarkably similar

Also left my passport on a flight in Indonesia..
Forgot one of my laptops at security in BKK
Also got bitten by a monkey in Thailand and had to get rabies shots (But not my fault as I did not approach him/her)
And the winner..

Trying to save the company money by booking the cheapest airline for my first few years of work travel.. realizing only later about the benefits of Frequent Flyer Programs when I got stranded at an airport overnight due to winter weather. (Elite passengers made the standby list. I did not)

Jackylad

Uncanny. I find that I make my biggest mistakes going East, always assumed it must be a relaxation thing.

MADPhil

One big mistake I made was to book a charter flight from Europe to attend a conference in the US only to find out when I tried to get reimbursed that, as a Bavarian civil servant, I was supposed to have flown Lufthansa First Class. It was difficult to get reimbursed too.

gaobest

october 12 1997 Sunday - I arrive at LHR and see a sign at UAL checkin that the LHR/Sfo flight is cancelled and that we will get hotel plus the 10/13/1997 morning flight. I panic and think how I must must return to Sfo because I have work on Monday. Argh. I get the lhr/ewr/Sfo flight with Y middle seats and am rushing to get to the LHR/ewr flight. Minor bits of panic. Oh I should have enjoyed that extra half day in London and just flown out on Monday. Blah.

for our honeymoon we used AA miles to fly AA F instead of using our AA miles to fly BA F. Argh such a horrible error on our part.

omg how did nobody tell you? That’s so cruel. The idea of flying LH F for work… it is just so wrong that you weren’t informed. I really hope that you had many other global conferences and that you did indeed fly LH F for them :-)

MADPhil

I'm not sure how I failed to find out but I guess I just made my own arrangements without asking. Unfortunately it was a one off so I never got the LH F ride. The rule was a quid pro quo for the government subsidy for LH I believe. On the plus side the per diem was enough to support me and my wife (who was already in the US) for a nice holiday in the Smoky Mountains.

Dave737

flew from Keflavik, Iceland to Oslo, with a 1 hour layover to fly to Bergen. i just wanted to get to the lounge (SAS) and wasn't paying attention. got in the lounge, hit the restroom, then got a drink and snacks. i'm looking around and notice there's no departures displayed on the monitors. so i go ask the lady at the desk and she says "sir, you're in the ARRIVALS lounge. departures is at the other end of the terminal."

she tells me there's a tunnel that bypasses all the shopping and other arrival gates. i get to the tunnel door and the scanner stops accepting boarding passes 30 minutes before departure. so i have to go back out, thru security, run... got to the gate just in time to see the jet bridge pulling back from my plane.

but they got me on the next flight an hour later.

EAJuggalo

I umpire high level softball some weekends in the summer. Traveled to a tournament three states away and left a day early so I wouldn't be dead tired when we start. Get to the hotel and go to grab my suitcase out of the back and it's not there. I left it sitting in my bedroom. By the time I realize that I forgot it, it was too late to get my wife to FedEx me uniform shirts. I was able to buy everything else the next day before we started and one of the other umpires had an extra shirt I could use.

Redhead

Fell down a neolithic burial mound on Anglesey and sprained my ankle terribly. Had to hop/crawl the mile back to my car and then drive 6 hours back to Cardiff with an ankle the size of a basketball. Needed to use both feet since it was stick shift car. By the time I got to my hotel I had tears streaming down my face. On the plus side, the NHS treated me most excellently and the doctor and x-ray tech were both smoking hot Made this otherwise sad lady very happy. I was on crutches for 8 weeks and commuted buweekly between Cardiff and LAX

Went to catch a flight at noon, only to realise it had been scheduled for midnight (12 hours earlier)

abaheti

Dropping my mom off at LAX for a trip to India. Being a dutiful son, wanted to get her there early to avoid traffic, let her check in, get through security, use the lounge and be comfy. Being an experienced FT member, decided to run copies of her passport, PIO card, credit card, etc. to keep with me. All good. We get to LAX, manage to park at Bradley which was a mess, get in line for the business class check in, give her name, put bags on scale. All good until they asked for her passport. Oops. All sitting on the glass of the all-in-one printer at her house. The agent said time to rebook, but I said no way, let's try. They were super nice, let my wife and mother stand to the side but never closed the transaction -- used a second spare terminal to help other pax. My wife kept my mom as relaxed as possible. I RAN to the parking lot and drove to her house breaking more than a few traffic rules. Grabbed docs, back to LAX, park, run inside. Hand over passport. Turns out brilliant son hadn't checked and her passport has less time on it than India requires (six months, I think, even if your trip will end sooner). Agent looks at me (sweaty, haggard, embarrassed). Looks at mom (somewhere between amused and disappointed in brilliant son). Agent gave me a look, kind of looked up at the ceiling, and printed out the boarding pass, checked the bags, and called for the next passenger. I walked my mom to security. In India, (surprise), nobody cared, she went through the green line or PIO line and was fine. She went to the consulate and got her passport renewed comfortably (even though she didn't need a new one to fly home technically). For those wondering how far I had to drive, it wasn't to Orange County or downtown LA, but it was far enough. LAX to the southern half of Torrance in some afternoon traffic on the 405 Crenshaw exit both ways. Thank goodness I had originally got her to LAX so early, but.... dumb dumb dumb. And, no, my wife does not let me live this down when I go into control mode around all our documents before we take trips now. :-)

elynchking

Sometime in the mid/late 90's, I was flying internationally a lot for work and usually with my boss who (along with travel agent) arranged all visas etc. Then he asked me to go to India (my first time) for him - I had to cancel a planned vacation and in return he offered to pay for me to go to Nepal (bucket list) for a week at the end of my biz trip. Travel agent did the ticket - off I went to Delhi out of YYZ. Sitting in seat 1A I was first at immigration on arrival and I still remember that sinking feeling in my stomach as I watched the agent search my passport page by page. Oops apparently you need a visa for India. If you've been to India, you can imagine the scene... Since AC hadn't checked my docs, they kept a person with me the entire time until it was decided that I would be given a 24 hour visa into Delhi, switch my whole trip and leave for Nepal the next day where I could get the visa, have my vacation and then head back to Delhi. I was horrified at this error - I was a seasoned traveler with extra pages in my passport from all the visas I'd needed but for some reason I never questioned this prior (but then again neither did boss, TA or AC - a series of unfortunate screw ups). It was a rocky start to my eventual love affair with India.

gaobest

I’ve driven my parents to the airport a few times before I finally stopped wasting my personal time on this around 2005. They lived 20 minutes away from me plus another 40 minutes to Sfo.

once I arrived at their house and I had to wake them up.

once I drove them to Sfo. On the freeway my father realizes that he left his wallet (with id) at home so we continue to Sfo to drop off my mother. Then drive him home and back to Sfo. During the drive to Sfo he comments on the heavy traffic back into San Francisco… bleck.

for our destination wedding in Italia, friends of my spouse booked their 6 plane tickets on AF and the tix were set to arrive the day of our wedding weekend because they failed to comprehend the time change. Between 2 mba and a phd they just missed this and then guilted my spouse into paying their 6 change fees. I was fully opposed to paying for their stupidity and my spouse chose to just pay it. Then for our opening supper, they couldn’t find our wedding place and were texting us - alas this was semi-remote Cianti on a rainy night so we didn’t even see any texts. They arrived and were complaining about how hard it was for them to find the party until then acknowledging that the other 50 guests were already there.
then they were late for my spouse’s pre-wedding supper. We had bachelor / hen suppers at different restaurants coincidentally in the same Greve central square and I popped over to greet my spouse and people only to learn that 6 guests hadn’t yet arrived. My spouse wasn’t thrilled and might have felt embarrassed.

zero error but my friend from Dortmund had a wedding in Schwarzwald (Black Forest) and somehow got to Basel, flew to Roma, took the train to Siena or Firenze, and then the bus to Greve to get to my supper. He arrived “late” as expected and just in time for the Bistecca Fiorentina! So that was super awesome. Plus now he’s dead (lung cancer at age 53) so I’ll always have the fond memory of him attending 2 weddings in Germany / Italia during the same weekend.

STVA

Left my iPad Mini at the United lounge at NRT. Guess I was just tired from a week long business trip and zoned out.

I actually got it back a couple months later; they shipped it to United's lost item depot in the US and I filled out a form to claim it.

goback

My passport fell out of my pocket while seated waiting for the Eurostar at Lille (after UK immigration). When they announced the arrival of the train I didn't check for my passport. Later in the train I was told by the train chief when we came out of the tunnel on the other side that it was found in Lille, however I was never able to get a further admission from Eurostar that they had found it, despite repeated efforts. I eventually went to the High Commission in London to get a new passport, feeling very foolish. I miss that Passport because of the many exotic stamps and visas.

wrp96

Going to NYC this coming weekend. I get there Saturday, friend I'm joining is coming down Sunday. She booked the hotel for Sunday night. I misread our discussions about the hotel and thought she'd changed the reservation to include Saturday night for me, which she didn't. Would've been a big surprise for me to show up at that hotel late Saturday night and discover I had no reservation especially since that hotel is now sold out.