Switch your brain on before you fly!

At the risk of completely embarrassing my beloved mother and brother, here is a little story.

The pair of them were due to arrive for a weekend visit (my brother's first) on Friday morning. At 6:30 am, I receive a call from my brother. "Is your flight delayed?' I ask. "Kind of" he responds. What transpires is that he had arrived at the airport minus his passport. Not clever. But, not yet an insurmountable problem. He could get on the next flight (for a small donation to Easyjet) and my Mum would still be able to fly to us on the morning flight, right? Sure, in theory. Unfortunately, on checking in, it became clear that my nice but dim mother had booked for them both to fly on 19th February (exactly one month earlier). Thus, no-one was going anywhere on that ticket! An expensive journey into the world of very last minute flight booking later and they were tucked up in bed sleeping off the effects of a disaster, ticket for same flight next day (+ 2 passports) in bag....Oh, but it isn't over yet....

The next morning at 6am (5am GMT) I receive a call from my Mother. In tears. Distraught. Beside herself. "We have only just woken up", she laments. Now, the flight is at 6 am from an airport which is an hour away. You do the maths. They weren't going to make that flight. Now I was a mixture of disappointed (I really love my family and hate that they are so far away) and furious (how on earth can anyone think their body clocks will wake them at 4 am WITHOUT the help of an alarm clock?!) After realising rather quickly that there was no way I could do anything from here at 6 on a Saturday morning, I told them both to calm down, get back in the car, get to the airport and try to sweet talk the Easyjet staff there. They certainly weren't going to have a problem switching on the waterworks for sympathy! As luck would have it, with another minimal donation, Easyjet was willing to put them on the lunchtime flight (the staff probably just thought it was best to get these fools out of the country otherwise they would still be trying to get their flight to Munich a week later). I told them, on pain of death, not to leave the airport. At any cost. They didn't, and eventually, only 2 days late, they arrived to a very, very happy, bouncy Max on Saturday evening. A wonderful weekend was had by all with zoos and swimming pools, ice-creams and sunshine galore. Thank goodness it all worked out OK in the end!

This is clearly a cautionary tale - switch your brain on before you fly everybody!