"Can I please put you back on hold?"

You know, life would be pretty boring if we didn't have challenges and stressful things come up every once in a while.

At work one of my things is to book travel for people in the Marketing department and for Sales guys that go to our tradeshows. We have a tradeshow starting next weekend and at the last minute one of our Sales guys was added to the group of people going. Not a problem really - there just weren't a lot of choices for flights. But I found one for him, booked it, and that was that. That was on Monday I think.

So the next day he calls and says that 2 days after the tradeshow ends he might have to be in Boston for a demo and doesn't think it makes sense to fly home and then fly back out to Boston. So he said he'd let me know asap.

I get a call from him today saying that he does need to be in Boston 2 days after the show, and can I please change his flight. Well, I usually book flights through Delta, but this time I used Orbitz because the only flight available on Delta was an overnighter - that wouldn't have worked out. So I go to Orbitz.com and cancel the flight, which happened to be non-refundable. In order to get the cost of the old ticket applied to the new ticket, I had to call Orbitz directly.

So I called, and tried booking it that way. It was extremely difficult to hear the lady I was talking to, and she couldn't hear me very well either. Maybe they should consider a new phone system. We finally got all the flights needed for this guy, and then......errors, errors, errors. Apparently their system wouldn't let her book a multi-city flight or something like that.

So after being put on hold more times than I can remember, she came back and told me that all she could do was book a flight from Long Beach (where he lives) to Montreal (where the show is) and from Boston (where the demo was) to Long Beach. All we were missing was Montreal to Boston. So I told her to go ahead and do that, and then I booked the missing flight myself online. So an hour later (I was seriously on the phone for an hour), I had all the tickets I needed for this guy.

All I can say is, I'm glad this is coming out of the Sales budget instead of ours, because this is one expensive flight.