Nonexistent

Excited and determined to get everything ready for tomorrow's trip, I happily called Northwest to confirm my flight, which I booked over a month ago. "Well," the woman said, "that's strange. We have no ticket for you, and no record of you whatsoever!" Fantastic. After a few transfers and a lot of hold time, and more exclamations--"How strange! You're not in our system at all. You seem to not even exist!"--they managed to (re)book me on my flights and issue me a ticket, which, for many complicated and ridiculous reasons, had not happened before.