They tell you not to count your chickens before they hatch, but here in Saudi you can't even count them AFTER they've hatched. We announced a week ago that we finally had our tickets to fly home in August, but it turns out that wasn't true. Somehow between last week and Sunday, the travel agency or consulting firm managed to cancel the reservations. Yes, we're dealing with both a consulting firm and travel agency to book these tickets. I have no idea why it takes so many middle men to get this done, but we tell the consulting firm what we want/need, they tell the travel agency, the travel agency give the consulting firm a few options, the consulting firm sends them to us, and we pick the most desirable one. It's like one huge game of telephone, so it's no surprise that this got screwed up. It's extra unsurprising because they managed to screw up our tickets when we came to Saudi a year ago.
Aside from the fact that I was royally cheesed off that this got screwed up, the consulting firm somehow got in their mind that it absolutely had to be fixed RIGHT THIS MINUTE. That meant they did a lot of: send me an email, wait two minutes, and then call me to ask if I'd gotten the email. So this went back and forth for a few hours resulting in a option for tickets on August 8th. This wouldn't be a huge deal, except we were told in no uncertain terms that we had to leave campus by the 5th. Turns out they're more that willing to change this rule so long as it saves them money on plane tickets.
So after two hours of headaches, emails, phone calls, and a very unpleasant tone of voice, we once again had plane tickets home.
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