Cold, bored and getting angry

I'm typing one-handed, in itself perhaps not that unusual among Internet users, but not for the usual reason. I'm on the phone, at least in theory, listening to Lufthansa's aggressively bland Dudelmusik and pseudo-news-babble in my left ear and Moby in my right. I am waiting, and have been for some twenty minutes.

All I want is to reserve a seat for my flight to Canada in five-and-a-half weeks (the ticket itself is already booked) but corporate inertia and territoriality make this a difficult task. The flight is under a Lufthansa flight number, but is actually operated by Air Canada (shudder). LH cannot reserve a seat because "our contingent of places is full" which implies that they have sold me a ticket that wasn't actually theirs to sell. Air Canada could reserve me a seat, of course, it is their plane; but they won't because LH issued my ticket. WTF? Is this really how a commercial partnership alliance (sorry) works? I would call this behaviour "broken" but then I'm just a customer, I'm only the guy who pays their salaries, so by definition I know nothing worth listening to. Bah.

Both AC and LH have websites, obviously, but neither of them is able to reserve a seat for somebody who already has a ticket.

Clearly I will be sitting in a jumpseat beside the toilets in row 73. Or strap-hanging in the aisle.

Damn, but it's cold. The weather changed on Sunday, while I was writing that balcony-blogging post. It has rained at least a few minutes every day this week, and the temperature has been steadily dropping. It's a chilly 18° as I write, and not much warmer in the apartment. I'm wearing long trousers for the first time in weeks, and a sweater (one of the few words that can be touch-typed normally with one hand, by the way, "few" is another) for the first time in months.

Well, I have endured this Dudelscheiße for 54 minutes, and am rapidly approaching the point where eleven hours in a jumpseat looks better than another minute of this auditory abuse. Bah.