Blogger’s Note: Don’t be fooled by the title. Although it is almost identical to last week’s, this is an entirely new post. Apologies for late posting, but we only got to bed at 5AM.

I’m writing this on Sunday evening as we cruise from West to East over Portugal, having driven from East to West through Portugal what was in fact just eight hours ago, but seems more like eight years.

I had a topic all lined up to regale you with this week, but the events of the last three-and-a-half hours have, perforce, swept aside all thoughts of a light amusing divertissement. Instead, prepare for a full-scale horror continuation of last week’s episode. See a grown man reduced to a gibbering idiot and a grown woman break down and cry. But be sure to always keep in mind that I am writing this from an El Al plane inexorably winging its way to Tel Aviv, so rest assured that you are guaranteed a happy ending.

The story so far. After a small fortune in international calls and several hours of assorted mindless call-queuing jingles, someone I hastily described last week as a ‘very helpful Opodo agent’ emailed us our etickets for today’s flight.

Now read on.

When El Al sent me an SMS with a link to check in online, I tried last night. Unfortunately, the link they gave me threw up a booking code which, when I tried to check in, elicited a response in red: We have identified a fault with this ticket, Please call customer service at this number.’

I waited until after 9PM (when, as we discovered last week, the kids’ landline cheap international rate kicks in) and called the number in Israel. This is, I would remind the members of the jury, a number explicitly for dealing with problems of passengers with flights within the next 72 hours. A recorded message informed me that this (basically emergency) number was only manned during normal working hours, 8–5, Sunday to Thursday, and a half-day on Friday.

Deciding to try my luck online again, this time I overrode the booking code and entered the number of our eticket. Wonder of wonders, it was accepted, and, within two minutes, Bernice and I were checked in, with seats across the aisle from each other,

I then set my alarm for 6AM (8 in Israel) to try to remove any niggling doubts about that ‘fault with the ticket’. After an understandably rather fitful night, I woke to the alarm, slipped downstairs, made myself a cup of tea, dialled El Al, and settled down for a long wait while I chopped up the fruit for today’s breakfast.

At this stage of the game I could only tolerate `18 minutes of El Al’s jingle assuring me that it was: ‘the most at home in the world’. Sadly, it may conceivably be the case that parents ignoring complaining children for hours on end may well be the most typical domestic experience in the Western world today, but, even so, it seems a poor choice of slogan. As I say, after 18 minutes, I hung up, put the diced fruit in a bag in the fridge, finished my tea and convinced myself that, after all, I had actually managed to check in, so what could go wrong?

When I presented that reasoning to Bernice an hour or so later, she was so much less than persuaded. Truth to tell, my sympathies were with her position, but almost 50 years have taught me at least one secret of a successful marriage: If the Eeyore position has already been taken by Partner A, then it is incumbent upon Partner B to play Piglet, however little his heart may be in it. And so I did, arguing that check-in was the irreversible step in securing a seat on a plane.

This was a position I maintained throughout the rest of the morning, and, after our last goodbyes to Micha’el, Tslil and Tao, also throughout the three-hour drive to Lisbon, during which we encountered the first proper threatening clouds of our entire month in Portugal, and even a little, light rain.

We made good time to the airport, returned our rental car without incident, and our pre-booked antigen test at the airport went smoothly, so that we arrived at the El Al check-in desks about half-an-hour before they opened. This gave us time to exchange stories with other travellers who had originally been on the Thursday or Wednesday flights that were cancelled. During this time, our negative results came to our phones! All seemed to be going smoothly, which should have aroused our suspicions.

A pleasant check-in clerk took our passports, weighed our luggage, and then began the elaborate and heart-sinking sequence of actions that always spell disaster. First he looked in puzzlement at the screen, then he rechecked our tickets, then he struck some more keys and looked more puzzled.

Act 2 began with him standing up, and going over to his colleague on the next desk, bringing her back to show her the screen, then engaging in low, slightly stressed-sounding conversation. Of course, since it was in Portuguese, which I don’t speak, and since they were both wearing masks, which muffled their speech and concealed their expressions, and since there was a lot of background noise from other desks and boisterous child passengers, and since my hearing is no longer able to distinguish an ant chewing a leaf 20 yards away,  I had no idea what the problem was…but I was in no doubt that what it was was a problem, and, by the look of it, not a small one.

In Act 3, the colleague, a TAP employee (this was a code-share flight and we were, indeed, booked on it as TAP passengers) phoned her TAP superiors. At this point, while Bernice expressed the conviction that we were condemned to spend the rest of our lives in Portugal, I grew increasingly, and counter-balancedly, calm, and politely asked the original clerk whether there was a problem. He explained that we had been booked onto the flight twice, and our agent (which, as far as I was concerned, was Opodo – only reachable at a British number; but which was, in fact, eDreams – only reachable at a French number that experience had taught me was unobtainable, and, I now discovered in the body of the eticket, also a German number) anyway, our agent, as I say, had failed to cancel the first booking before making the second booking. We had checked in on the second booking, but in the computer system the Print button for printing a boarding card for the second booking was disabled, since there was an open first booking.

Hands up if you knew that it was going to turn out to be an act of human error that had painted the computer into a corner. And feet up if you have also guessed that, when I suggested the clerk override the system, or hand-write a boarding card, he explained that there was, simply, nothing that he could do. All he could suggest was that I phone my agent and instruct him to cancel the first booking; this would, he assured me, resolve everything.

This was the point at which I explained that neither my Portuguese nor my Israeli phone could make international calls, and maybe they might allow me to use their phone to try to contact my agent. I also pointed out that, going by past experience, I would fail to get through to either Opodo or eDreams (whom I now thought of as Opodon’t and eNightmares) before the plane took off.

The clerk, whose calm  and pleasant nature was proving less and less of a satisfying counterbalance to his complete ineffectualism, explained that their telephones were all airport internal only, with no outside lines. This was, if my memory serves me, the straw that broke Bernice’s back. She seldom cries, and even less frequently in public, but there in the airport she simply broke down. The second clerk solicitously brought her a chair, and, as I attempted, with increasing lack of conviction, to assure her that it would all be sorted, a kind passenger came over and suggested that I find a public phone.

I honestly didn’t think this would help, and I was reluctant to leave Bernice, but it at least seemed like a plan, so off I went, having been less than reassured by Bernice that she would be OK. As it turned out, my leaving was a masterstroke, albeit unintentionally so.

The next 15 minutes were, for me, pure farce, and seemingly interminable. First, no staff that I stopped could tell me where there was a public phone. Then I was directed to a phone that, after a couple of minutes of trial and error, I established was for internal airport and emergency services only. Then, another member of staff  told me where there was a bank of public phones, although she could not guarantee that they were in service.

I eventually found them, two floors down, next to bathrooms that were being noisily cleaned. I was relieved to see that the phones had a slot for cards, so I inserted my Portuguese debit card, and decided to call the eDreams German number. Unfortunately, the eticket did not include the Germany country code, so I quickly googled that, only to discover that the free airport wifi does not reach the basement. So, I grabbed my debit card, ran up the stairs, googled the code, ran downstairs chanting ‘0049, 0049’, inserted my debit card and dialled. The number did not connect. Indeed, I still had the dialling tone.

I eventually realised that my debit card would, of course, not work, and so I inserted my Israeli credit card. When that produced the same result, I removed that card and decided to try to read the Portuguese instructions above the phone. I’m fairly sure they stated that the phone takes coins and phonecards (which, of course, I didn’t have). I quickly fed in the 6.90 euros-worth of coins I had, and prayed that would be enough, but the phone still would not connect me. So, I retrieved my coins, and retraced my steps as far as the Vodafone shop, where I intended to ask the clerk to open my phone for international calls, and, failing that, to throw myself on his mercy and offer to pay him to use his phone.

At this point, Bernice WhatsApp called me, to say that an El Al security man was trying to sort out the problem, and wanted to see the etickets (which, of course, I was holding). I raced back to the check-in desk, where Assaf (who we plan to nominate for the El Al employee of the year award) greeted me calmly. He took the etickets, sent a photo of them to a colleague, and said she would see what she could do. Meanwhile, he explained that he is not technically allowed to intervene in matters of check-in procedure, but he couldn’t stand by and watch our distress. Bernice later told me that an Israeli couple in the queue, seeing the state she was in, had gone over to Assaf and pointed out to him the situation.

Three minutes later, Assaf returned with the news that his colleague expected to have the problem sorted in five minutes, and that the clerk should try to print boarding cards again then. And, sure enough, five minutes later, we had boarding cards and all was resolved, after what we subsequently calculated was 75 minutes of hell.

All that remained was to thank the two clerks warmly, and to thank Assaf very, very warmly, to check in our luggage, and to resolve only ever to fly El Al in future, with a real-life human travel agent. Both the clerks and Assaf assured us that they had endless stories of passengers being let down by eDreams clerks’ incompetence.

This has been a public service announcement, brought to you by the Israel Association of Travel Agents and El Al.

And this is what we have wrenched ourselves away from, and what makes all that trauma bearable.