Peeking into the rock

So Saturday I had to drive over the hill -- in the entirely unseasonable rain -- to the San Jose airport to show my credit card (debit card) to a Delta ticket agent. Nobody I've talked to has ever had to do this, but apparently Accra is one of those places that has substantial fraud associated with it, and this is some kind of extra assurance that the card is real and so am I.

Lately I've had a problem reading the map: this is because the major north-south freeways have east-west patches in Silicon Valley and I've been looking at small map patches on Google maps and they're all weird at those places so I keep getting the wrong idea about which side I need to get off the freeway on. I need to invest in a new set of actual paper road maps for the car. So I hada small but extremely frustrating detour. Other than that it went pretty smoothly except . . .

There were several ticket agents standing around doing not much when I arrived. Good, this meant that my small mission would be quickly accomplished. But no. Only one of the ticket agents got what I was talking about, and he was all over that and smugly efficient until . . .

This fellow showed up with a weird story. He had gotten a call from Delta telling him that his flight was delayed, but when he got to the airport, he found that it was not delayed, it had already left. First they sent him to the next door airline that actually flew his flight, but they sent him back because he had ticketed through Delta and the false delay message had come through Delta. They had no problem agreeing that he was entitled to a re-ticket or a refund, but it took six Delta agents, including the one who was processing my car, and two Horizon agents, to work out the logistics. For some reason. So the officious but competent-seeming little nerdy guy in the black turtleneck who had apparently forty or so fields to enter things into to register the fact that my card had a physical reality kept leaving the screen that he was working on my problem with to look at other screen relevant to the other person's problem and I was standing there with a very impatient bladder and an expensive parking place (well, expensive by my standards, I don't think it's all that expensive in the grand scheme of things)for much longer than I expected or intended.

My issue went without a hitch, eventually, and I got to pee and to get out of there in less than an hour, and I got to Ranch 99 and I got back over the hill and picked Emma up at the fabric store and returned her to her house and I have Gelatinous Mutant Coconut Strings! And Frank is good to go to Ghana, despite the fact that he's forgotten his bank password and the kindly Czech bank won't tell him his password or allow him to reset it (what?).

In the course of listening to this drama next to me -- the guy had a really complicated itinerary involving flying to LA for one day, flying up to San Francisco for another day, and then flying to Florida -- I learned that in fact, a lot of passengers had been getting random false messages that their flights had been delayed. Nobody knew where in the system the problem was -- was it the airport? was it Delta? was it in the computer system? where? The moral of that one is: if they tell you your flight is delayed, go at the original time anyway and take an extra snack and an extra puzzle book.

But really, eight ticket agents to solve that? When all they actually had to do was to check if there was a flight to get him to Los Angeles that evening? (there was, and there was exactly one seat left on it)

On another front, mutant coconut on top of roasted pumpkin makes a really nice desert.