a $75 mistake

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welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, and always up to something in social good x tech.

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onto today’s topic: a $75 mistake ✈️ 

i made an embarrassingly rookie mistake at the airport today.

i woke up at 6am, checked out of my hotel, and hopped on the airport shuttle to catch my “9 am” flight. it was all smooth sailing — made it through security and took a seat near my gate at 8:20 am. when i looked at the gate screen, i noticed my flight to rdu wasn’t showing up on the display so a quick google search led me to the realization that there was no flight to rdu at 9am. the next one was at 10am.

my heart sank.

i checked my boarding pass again, and indeed, turns out my flight wasn’t at 8:55 in the morning. it departed at 8:55 in the evening. 

cooked.

yes, i know, that was entirely my fault and honestly ridiculous considering how much i’ve traveled. 😭 if i had nothing important to get done for the day, my reaction probably would have been, “oh nice, an extra day in boston, let me head back into the city.”

unfortunately, my gcal for today is packed with back to back meetings from noon until 10pm. so, i had to get back to chapel hill.

my best case scenario: successfully move my flight up to the 10am route because it was through the same airline. i went through the jetblue chatbots and tried to change my flight; however, it said the 10am was completely unavailable. i tried to look for the in-person jetblue support desk to no avail, and was growing a little hopeless.

i even tried to compose myself and stared at my calendar to see what i could reschedule. spoiler: not much. 😬 

when it comes to customer support, i still believe humans are more efficient than chatbots and agents in actually getting things done. so, i spammed “0” to get to a human agent on jetblue’s support line. thankfully, there was a singular seat left available and i snagged it with an additional price tag of $75. honestly, the $75 was worth saving me from a ruined day. 🤷‍♀️ 

now, i’m writing this while waiting to board my 10am flight.

it is what it is — i will be triple checking time of day and timezones of everything from now on.

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