MrLittlePants and I went to Georgia for the weekend on separate flights, and I had a doozy of a time getting down there. I had decided in advance that I would remove my shoes before security purgatory, to save myself a coronary, but then I left my ticket on a table during the shoes-laptop-ticket-id shuffle. Shit.

While boarding the plane, the queeny gate agent exchanged my computer printed ticket for a different one that came out of the machine without a word of explanation. I’m not so great with numbers, so it wasn’t immediately apparent to me that I had just then gotten screwed out of my exit row window seat. I waited until I got to 44C, the second to last aisle seat in the airplane, to ask what the heck had happened.

The flight attendants all immediately pushed blame to the gate agents, so I called their bluff and fought my way back to the front of the plane, up the jet way, and finally back to the queen to ask him what happened. He was happy to tell me that my seat had been exchanged overnight by the computer when the airplane was also exchanged, but he couldn’t tell me why he had kept this information to himself when I passed by earlier. Neither could his supervisor.

I yelled at them both for about 10 minutes. (It’s no fun exiting an airplane while everyone’s getting on it, so I had to make it worth the trip.) I’m not sure I convinced them of very much, but I certainly made an impression. It was cowardly and dishonest of the agent to slip me a changed boarding pass, and it ruined my evening.

Long live air travel.