Take an early morning flight out of Cork.
Go to the check-in desk and discover that you never booked a ticket. This, of course, takes a while to be fully revealed and confirmed. During this time you can panic, despair, annihilate yourself, and see this as a continuation of a run of bad luck which began the day you were born.
You can also curse the complexity of booking several flights together, just to go to Sweden for a couple of days… to pick up some of your “cost centre no. 1″’s baggage. (I sweatily acknowledge Moneypenny in the FT Weekend Magazine for this inspired term.)
After accepting that you have made a monumental cock-up for which Ryan Air can’t be blamed, you can return to the ServiceAir Ticket desk to buy a ticket. You can find out that the flight has closed and you are stranded.
At this point, you will probably have had enough, especially if you began with a load of unpleasant things on your mind.
But, you can persist and fork up for a ticket to Dublin (E85) and another to Stansted (E221) - saying to yourself that this is better than returning home in disgrace. So I flew to Dublin.
Dublin is big, so is its airport and the RyanAir ticket desk is miles from where you come in. Time was disappearing and I ran, so that my heart gave out. That was when I died, and went to hell.
Later they sold me a ticket. I rushed again. To the boarding gate… to the gate… RyanAir flight late taking off. But how late? No one on the gate. Look harder. You can find a small woman hiding behind a big desk marked RyanAir customer service. I think she was positioned there so that they could say there was something, but she was never meant to talk to anyone.
More later… if I get back from the dead.
