So I’m on the phone with United. Actually, no. I am not so much on the phone with United — as in “an actual representative of United Airlines” — so much as I am engaged in a vicious verbal war with the automated bouncer at the virtual customer service door. Trust me: He does not want to let you in.

Automated Customer Service Guy: “Thanks for calling the United Mileage Plus customer service line. Would you like: reservations, upgrades, enroll in Mileage Plus, or for everything else say manage my account.”
Me: “Um, customer service?”
ACSG: “Sorry, please say: reservations, upgrades, enroll in Mileage Plus, or for everything else say manage my account.”
Me: (silence)
ACSG: “Sorry, I didn’t hear you. Please say: reservations, upgrades, enroll in Mileage Plus, or for everything else say manage my account.”
Me: (muttering) “I don’t need those.”
ACSG: “Sorry, did you say, ‘goodbye?'”
Me: “No!”
ACSG: “Let’s get your Mileage Plus number. Say or enter your 11-digit Mileage Plus number.”
Me: (tries frantically to locate the number on my desk, manages to key in four digits before allotted time expires)
ACSG: “Sorry, that was in invalid number. Please say your Mileage Plus number one digit at a time, or say: I don’t know it. Or, say: Help.”
Me: “Help?”
ACSG: “Let’s get your Mileage Plus number. Say or enter your 11-digit Mileage Plus number.”
Me: “I FUCKING HATE YOU.”

***********************

I related all this to the beau later, using sweeping arm gestures and perhaps a higher pitch of voice than necessary. He looked at me coolly. “You know, you could have just hit “0” to bypass all those menus,” he said.

Really? REALLY? Was I the last person on earth to know this? Did all of you just read through that now, wincing and ducking like you were watching a bad horror flick; shouting at your computer screen, “Press zero! No! Press zero NOW! Don’t go in the basement! PRESS ZEROOOOO!”

If not, THERE YOU HAVE IT. Now you know the secret trick. No, seriously, you can thank me later.

Let me just say right now: I am not a phone person. Talking on the phone with strangers is my own special flavor of personal hell. But I was having issues with my online account and the error page was telling me I needed to call someone in order to fix it.

So, I sucked it up and made the call. I sacrificed myself for the sake of our post-wedding sanity. See, the beau was a mere 1,500 miles short of the 50,000 needed to get two round-trip tickets for free, and I had to transfer some miles from my account to his so that we could book our flights. That’s right. Flights. To Vancouver. For the honeymoon. We’re leaving the Monday morning after the wedding and coming back the following Wednesday. One glorious full week of non-travel vacation days in between.

So, we’ll be in Vancouver as newlyweds. VANCOUVER. I haven’t been to Vancouver since the summer of ’89, when my parents and I road-tripped from the San Francisco bay area to British Columbia in our 1984 Ford Tempo.* Thank god my parents only had one child, because most of the backseat was taken up by our humongous cooler. I couldn’t stretch out or lie down; the best option I had was to fold my arms over the top of the plastic lid and rest my head on them. I collected blue, green, and brown sea glass on the beaches across from run-down NorCal motels. We stopped and gazed at the inverted beauty of Crater Lake. I saw blue-haired punks for the first time in my life in Seattle. We drove our car onto a ferry (OMG the car went RIGHT ON THE BOAT) and it deposited us in Vancouver, where I saw a clock that spurted forth steam and a park with a horse-drawn carriage and there was a GOLDEN RETRIEVER in that park and the owners let me pet it, and we ate at a place called The Old Spaghetti Factory and that was super exciting because HELLO, spaghetti, plus they served me an Italian soda in a tall skinny glass, and we got to take that glass home with us.**

Yeah. This time around it’s going to be really, really, really different.

Where you goin’ on honeymoon, yo? Or: Where did you go, and what were your best memories from that trip?

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* I am not sure how that car made it all the way to Canada; it frequently couldn’t make it 10 miles from our house.

** This is amazing when you’re eight. Seriously.