On Friday (in the morning of the day of my departure), I received an email from Chase Visa saying I didn’t pay my bill, which was due on that day. I clearly remember scheduling the payment for June 24 (it happened to me once that Chase processed my payment the next day and left me with a past-due amount, so I always make sure I have a payment scheduled a day before the due date).
I logged in to my bank account, and there was no payment on June 24, which left me puzzled. A minute later, I realized what was wrong: I had scheduled the payment for July 24 instead of June 24! I promptly scheduled a new payment, but since it was Friday, I could only schedule it for Monday, which would make it four days overdue.
I started calling my bank (and it’s not easy in the middle of my workday), and as always happens these days, it takes some time to reach a human. Fortunately, I succeeded, and a person on the other end of the line told me that they, “as a courtesy”, will remove the fees when they receive my payment on Monday. Which they did, and life became better 🙂
Then, on Monday, I was booking our trip to Tallinn, and was struggling with the Tallink website: they are prompting people to book a day trip, which is way cheaper than any overnight trip, so I did it incorrectly first, that tried to rebook, then was adding and removing meals, and finally, when it looked like everything was done, I hit the payment button. It was spinning forever; I saw the charge appear on my phone, but the Tallink website responded that “something was wrong,” but they will resolve it and send me an email.
The email never arrived, and Talling was still showing as an unpaid trip, so on Tuesday, I sent a message to customer support. They replied that I had a duplicate booking, and they just canceled the second one. I thought that the issue was happily resolved and didn’t look at the reservation again. It was only on Thursday morning, right before we were ready to leave the house, that I realized two things: that the booking had not been canceled, was a day trip, and also that I hadn’t booked a meal for the inbound trip. Unfortunately, it was already impossible to change the reservation, so I had to book a new one for the next day (this was a minor thing, because of the special pricing of day trips). What was worse that there was no way to pre-book a buffet, which I was hoping for. If there weren’t that many people on board, we could pay for the buffet “at the door,” but the ferry was packed. I was very disappointed, even though Boris kept telling me it wasn’t a big deal. And it was not, I just hate when things are not going as planned.
There are a lot of places to eat on a ferry, and even more places to sit, so it was just me not checking the tickets.
Hettie's Reflections 