Here's the deal: I'm supposed to be in Costa Rica, but I'm in Berkeley instead. Our flight out of oakland to phoenix was delayed to the point that, if we took the flight, we would miss our flight out of phoenix to costa rica. The nice lady at America West's ticketing counter booked us on a Taca airline flight out of San Francisco to Costa Rica. It was a red-eye.

So they put us on a shuttle to SFO, and we got there at around 3:00. The Taca desk doesn't open untill about 9:00 pm. We spent the afternoon in the airport reading Harry Potter.

Once the Taca desk opened, the agent told us there was a problem. The America West agent had booked us on the 1:00 AM for *Saturday* morning. I don't know how she managed to get a confirmation number on a flight that had left 11 hours previous.

Upon hearing this, we troop over to the America West desk (in a whole different terminal) just to find it completely desserted.

At this point it's about 9:30 and Nikki starts trying to get a hold of someone at America West on the phone. After telling the above story no fewer than three times--and it's a confusing story, so it takes a while to tell--the AW people tell us to go home and try again tomorrow.

So 16 hours later, here we are, back in Berkeley, booked on the exact same flights for Sunday.

PS The moral of the story is: don't fly america west.