Struth!

IN his continuing search for the more weird, wacky and wondrous in this world, David Ellis says it pays to check that boarding pass before you get on your plane, or like a Taipei lady last month, you could find yourself in for a surprise.

Because she not only was given the wrong boarding pass, she was put on the wrong plane and the wrong airline – but did end up in the right city.

The 34 year old lady’s Hong Kong boyfriend had booked her on a flight from Taipei to Hong Kong, but being an inexperienced flyer she went to the check-in counter of a different airline to the one she was booked on.

And somehow the clerk there happily accepted her ticket, and issued her with a boarding pass that was in the name of a male passenger booked on the same flight and who had the same surname as herself.

Bizarrely she was then able to pass through Immigration without anyone querying that she was a Ms travelling on a ticket in the name of a Mr, waited in the wrong airline’s passenger holding area, and was checked onto the wrong plane of the wrong airline by yet another clerk who also did not pick-up that she was a Ms on a Mr ticket.

And because she arrived in Hong Kong at roughly the same time she would have on the flight she was supposed to be on, her boyfriend had no idea of what she had done… until the original airline in Taipei called on his mobile to tell him that his girlfriend had been a no-show and thus missed her flight.

To their surprise he told them that she was in fact standing right next to him then and there in Hong Kong.

Now both airlines and Taipei Immigration authorities are investigating how the lady could have got through Immigration and flown on the wrong ticket and wrong airline with so many discrepancies in her documentation – and wondering just what happened to the Mr on whose boarding pass she had made her flight.

David Ellis, ellispr@bigpond.net.au