On vacation for a few days (fortuitous airline screw-up edition)

So, here’s how the last ten hours or so went down:

Yesterday afternoon. Friend tries to use PayPal to pay for Delta airline tickets to fly over for a visit.

Delta gives him some generic “transfer could not be processed” error. No tickets.

Friend checks his PayPal balance. Payment went through. Still no tickets on Delta’s end.

Cue frantic and increasingly irate phone-calls to typically useless customer service representatives. Arrive at a stalemate.

Skip forward to 3:30 AM (1.5 hours ago at this writing). Friend receives email from Delta: Payment finally, very belatedly, went through. He has tickets.

Departure set for 6:40 AM. Today.

Looks at the time.

Cue maniacal laughter.

So, yeah. From today ’til Sunday the 19^th, consider me temporarily AWOL. (Or whatever the version with official leave is.) Some blogging may still take place, but don’t count on it. I’ll mostly be active on Twitter (to some extent) and saving up more important links for when I return.

Arrivederci!

(The Preliator 2012 Survey is still live, however. I’ve already received more responses than last year’s sad little 12, so wouldn’t it be so totally awesome if you fine folks saw fit to welcome me back in a week’s time with another response or two to finally push it over 2010’s record?)