In Australia, they call Americans 'sepos'. Where does this term come from, you ask? Well it is a derivation of Yankee, which Australians shorten to yank, which sounds like tank. From there they get 'septic tank' and since they like to shorten every single word in the English language, you're left with 'sepo'. So there you have it. They think we're full of shit. Anyway, I only mention this behavior because it relates to the title of this blog 'total 'mare' which is short for 'total nightmare'. My colleague, Victoria, says it all the time and I absolutely love it. It also perfectly describes the debacle that has been booking my trip to Indonesia.
So as you may know, my flatmate James and I had been planning on going to Indonesia to go on a diving trip over the Easter holiday. Australians get Friday and Sunday off for Good Friday and Easter, respectively, and ANZAC day, which normally falls on that Monday is being pushed to Tuesday, so essentially that leaves us with a 5 day weekend. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that by taking the three days off of the following week, you get a 10 day holiday. I definitely did not want to waste it.
So James and I have been trying to get SCUBA certified, and being compulsive and a chronic planner when it comes to vacations, I was hounding him to figure out the dates so we could book our flights (which were getting seriously expensive). He kept delaying it saying he wanted to hear from his friends who were going also and make sure the dates met up with theirs, when finally last weekend, during another round of me nagging him to book the tickets, he told me he wasn't sure he'd be able to afford to go.
That was all of the impetus i needed. I immediately booked it upstairs and bought my ticket right then. Alone or with people, I was going to do this. Not too long after, the fear of going to an island alone that Australia considers to be high risk for terrorist activity set in. I began to panic, and quickly found a website for travelers to post the dates and locations they'll be traveling so you can meet up with other people. Though I found several people who I'm sure are all very nice going to Bali at the same time as me, it felt a little bit like online friend dating, and unfortunately, on these 'dates' you can't just get drunk, nod politely and pretend to listen until the date is over. You're essentially making a commitment to do some serious traveling with someone you've never met before. I decided to call this my 'Plan B' and I made plan A posting on Facebook 'Anyone want to go to Bali April 22nd through April 30th?', otherwise known as a Facebook Hail Mary. I quickly got multiple responses from people saying how awesome it was that I was going and how much they wished they could go. Then I got my first stroke of luck - (Be aware, these instances of luck don't occur very frequently in this story, so savor them) - My best friend from the time I was 8 years old, Bonnie, was going to be in Bali during the exact dates that I would be. Not only that, but she was going with her boyfriend and 10 of his friends for his 30th birthday. Soon after, a Googler who moved from the Sydney office to the Singapore office not long ago said he would be there too. I was cautiously optimistic...and apparently delusional that the end of my troubles would be over.
The next day I woke up to emails that regretted to inform me that I had been kicked out of my final two open water dives that I needed to complete my scuba certification, due to a bug in their system allowing overbooking. I had no more time to do these so I just had to concede to myself that diving would not be a part of this vacation. This was followed up by an email from QANTAS, my airline, informing me that my first flight on my connecting flight on the way back from Bali had been changed. It had shifted forward 2 hours, so now it was expected to land in Perth (layover location) at the exact same time my connecting flight to Sydney would be taking off. This was not good.
I called QANTAS and waited the standard 20 minutes on the call line until I could speak to a human. After about 35 minutes of conversation, the customer service rep on the phone told me the flight changing was too confusing and he would have someone who dealt with complicated ticket changes call me the next morning. Sure enough, she called. She let me know that my options were either to take the next available flight to Sydney from Perth, which meant I'd be stuck at the airport for 16 hours, during which time they couldn't offer me accommodation because it was under 24 hours, or they could refund my entire ticket. I asked if there were any direct flights they could put me on instead and they said even though direct flights existed, since I booked a connecting ticket, I had to change it to another connecting ticket. I should mention that the first half of the connecting flight was through JetStar, a partner airline of QANTAS, and the second flight was through QANTAS. My flight to Bali was a direct flight on JetStar. This is important because it comes into play later.
Anyway, the representative advised that I think about it, maybe look at other fares and see if I wanted my refund and then call them back with my decision. I hung up, looked online at JetStars site and was able to find flights directly there and directly back for the same price I was paying before anyway. The only drawback is that I will get into Sydney at 6:30am Monday morning and then have to head straight to work, but I can handle that. No biggie. I immediately book the round trip ticket since there are only a few seats left and I proceeded to call QANTAS back and be put on hold for the standard 20 minutes. When someone finally answered, I told her my situation and she looked at my file. "Oh, we can only refund you for the second half of the flight. The part of the flight that changed. It's JetStars policy to not refund for the first half." Frustrated and near tears (calling from my desk at work, mind you. I'm pretty sure everyone thinks I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown) I tried to reason with her that I was told I would be getting a full refund and no one had made me aware of JetStars policy, and due to this, I now had two seats booked in my name to Bali on the same flight on the same day. If I was obese or extremely rich, this might not be a problem. However being an average-weighted, modest incomed twenty something, this was. The representative offered to transfer me to talk to JetStar, which I accepted. The next woman I spoke to had a weak grasp of the English language at best. It took a further half hour to explain to her that I was booked on the same flight twice and needed one of them to be refunded. She explained that she would refund the one that I had just booked as they can't refund anything after 24 hours. I told her this would be fine and hung up the phone, relieved to be done with this whole debacle, or so I thought...
A few minutes later an email came through with my refund information from QANTAS. The entire ticket had been refunded, even though they only told me they could refund half. I then noticed I had a new voicemail. The original rep from QANTAS who had called me had left me a message knowing that they had called JetStar and had in fact been able to refund my whole ticket. So within a matter of minutes I had gone from having two tickets to Bali and one returning home to having no tickets to Bali and one returning home. The prospect of going back into the seventh circle of call center hell was about as appealing as holding Oprahs hand while she takes a poo. Defeated, I realized this was the only way, and so I looked up JetStars call center number online. I call it. Busy. I found that odd since usually they just send you straight into the call tree so you're lost for about 10 minutes before they even tease you with the prospect of speaking to a real live human. For the next hour, I tried the call center number, each time hitting the 'Redial' button with just a little more force, as if I could somehow bully my phone into connecting the call. After my forceful dialing knocked my phone clear off my desk, I concluded the only way I was going to be able to do this was calling QANTAS, going through their call tree, and requesting to be transferred to JetStar so I could then go through their call tree. The very anticlimactic ending to this is, I did, I got through to JetStar and they were able to rebook my ticket. My shitty adventure was over. I could breathe easy.
Not so fast. Though my ticket was finally all sorted, life wasn't done shitting on me yet for the day. An hour or so later, I got my tax returns from Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC). As part of my relocation package to Australia, I get to have them do my taxes. They asked me to review the returns and then sign some papers to efile them. I started to look over them and almost fell out of my chair. I owed thousands upon thousands of dollars to the U.S. government. In my second (and final) stroke of luck in this story, I was fortunate enough to start bitching over IM at anyone who would listen to me (or else just quietly ignore my IM rants). One of the people who did engage with me was Hailey, a fellow Googler and american ex-pat who moved over here around the same time I did. She did not get the PwC taxes as part of her relocation bonus and had been using Turbo Tax. What she already knew, and what even apparently Turbo Tax told her was that if you are outside of the use for 330 days over the course of a year, then you are exempt from paying tax on your foreign income. The kicker on this is that the year that those 330 days are being judged from doesn't have to start at the beginning of the previous year. It just has to start on any day of the tax year. So basically if you just looked at the 2010 calendar year, which PwC did for me, I was definitely not out of the U.S. for over 330 days since I left in April. However considering it is April 8th now, if you look back a year ago from today, I am well over the 330 days I'd have to spend outside of the U.S. So lesson learned. Turbo Tax has your back. PwC doesn't. Anyway, I've sent all of my newfound information to PwC with an email sternly requesting that those fools fix the mess they made. No word back yet, but if my luck continues on its current trajectory you may be reading another blog post like this very soon.
