First I'd like to say that we're not lazy or forgetful. We waited until the last minute to try to see if we would be granted our "carte de sejour", that lovely little card that allows us to stay legally. As it turned out we still don't know, though we might hear more about that tomorrow.
We knew that we had to change our tickets before the clock showed April 11, 2005 in Britain, as we were dealing with British Airways. So Sunday morning, Loren and I decided that we would risk it and push the tickets all the way back to Christmas time.
We picked up the yellow pages and looked up British Airways. This, by the way, is a very posh thing to do, as the yellow pages were issued for the first time in Tunisia this year. You can find everything in there from chicken slaughterers to tile vendors and more. We found B.A. and gave them a call, and guess what? They are closed on Sundays. They don't even leave a forwarding number or international number. They just say "If you'd like to leave a message please dial 0 and we'll get back to you during regular office hours."
That's Tunisia for you.
So what did we do? We got dressed up nice, and booted our little buns to the airport, that's what. B.A. has a service booth there to help customers. We'd seen it when we dropped Jodie off just the day before. We ran straight to the booth and found that there was no one there. How odd. It took us about an hour of being directed from one person to another, none of whom knew anything about how to get ahold of B.A. until we found out from the information desk that all the representatives were gone for the day since the last flight left at 10:30 AM. And no they wouldn't be back.
Why did we not check with information first? Well we did. In fact we checked with them about seven times, and yes, it was always the same person we dealt with.
So now what? Our ticket had two international numbers listed on it. One toll-free number in Britain and one in the USA. The office in the USA wasn't open yet and we were not permitted to access the British one from our Tunisian lines. Go figure.
So we waited.
When the office was open in the USA we called to change the tickets, but realized that our credit card, issued in 2005, had not yet been activated. Since the mail it had come in had all been opened and thouroughly perused, I was reluctant to activate it in case some Postal employee tried to use it online. I guess I had waited too late.
Thank god for family. Loren called home and asked his mom if she could do it (thanks mom!). Unfortunetly her name was not on the ticket, so she couldn't change it for us. We called my mother for a credit card number, and (thanks mom!) with credit card number in hand we were ready.
We put 25 Dinars on our phone card so that we would have plenty of money to last the long wait with the campy music, and then when we got through to Aaron, our operator, we learned we didn't need to have a credit card after all!
Imagine that! All that panic for what? Well, at least we're coming home for Christmas.
posted by tiaraletourneau @ 3:30 p.m.
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