Kindness of Strangers

I arrived home last Thursday evening to find a FedEx envelope propped against the front stoop.  I love getting mail — I have been known to drop whatever I’m doing to dash to the mailbox the moment the postman peels away from the curb – so getting a FedEx package is like hitting the mail jackpot.  The outside of the envelope stated that the sender was American Airlines.  Our plane tickets!  It’s been a few weeks since we ordered them, and I was beginning to get a little nervous that our credit card hadn’t been charged, and that we hadn’t received one iota of proof that we’d actually purchased said tickets.  Being able to hold the bundle of plane tickets in my hand was a huge relief.

I took the tickets out of their paper casing and began to flip through them like a stack of bills.  I was astonished.  The reservationist kept telling us that it would take awhile to generate the tickets because they had to be “written.”  This made no sense to me until I opened the tickets.  Instead of the computer-generated tickets that I am accustomed to seeing, I discovered that our tickets are literally handwritten.  That’s right:  some poor schmo had to go through and meticulously pen each of our nineteen legs.  The tickets don’t even look real.  It’s as if we decided to play the game Airplane — “I want to be the ticket agent!  Let ME write the tickets!” — and created our own tickets (paid for, no doubt, with Monopoly money).  During one of our many conversations with the folks at OneWorld, we learned that they will be phasing out these type of tickets over the next few months, and now we know why. 

As the proud owners of handwritten relics, I wonder what sideways glances we’ll get when we present our flight coupons to the various ticketing counters around the globe.  I was worried that we’d be denied admission until my friend, Lee, assured me that handwriting tickets is “old school.”  He grew up in Hawaii and, as a frequent island hopper in the 1980s, saw many a handwritten ticket.  So my mind is once again at ease, and I am excited to finally be able to hold our plane tickets in my hands…even if they don’t seem quite real.