I was actually planning on doing a regular Max the Min today… except I was coming home from vacation yesterday and our travel was cursed.
You may skip the next two paragraphs if you don’t want details about *how* cursed my travel was and want to go straight to the Pathfinder stuff.
First off, my wife had started the process of changing her maiden name to married name on the airline account ages ago but it apparently didn’t take because they issued her ticket in her maiden name. So had to call customer service to fix it, and they accidentally unreserved her window seat next to me in the process… and promptly sold it and shoved her in a different middle seat. Then the reservation was broken, so she couldn’t actually check in or access any mobile tickets, so we had to leave an extra hour early to go to the front desk to check in, where the helpful worker had to spend 20 minutes on hold with their Data Recovery Center helpline because not even she could un-bork whatever customer service had done. Then we had tried to check in for our rental car early, except the automated system didn’t recognize the driver license or maybe the face photo and the system doesn’t allow retries. One and done and if the ai doesn’t like you, you have no choice but to go to the front desk for more time. Oh well, deal with that when we get there. Desk checks my wife in and hands her a physical ticket, we go through security…. And the x ray machine ate her ticket! Somehow it got blown out of the tray. We couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of that as we told security. He sticks his hands into the machine and comes back with a fistful of tickets and baggage claim receipts… none were hers. So got a reprint and thankfully got on the plane, car reservation desk was great, got to our vacation fine.
… Then there was the return trip. We had anticipated the lack of a seat reservation (which again… we had paid extra for) and made sure to speak with a real agent to get us seated next to each other which was annoying but better than being apart for the 3.5 hour flight. But when we went to the desk again to check in… apparently the reservation borking had deleted the fact we’d paid for a checked bag. Thankfully we had receipts. Went through security nice and early enough to have lunch, got boarded on the plane, excited to head home. Immediately deboarded the plane due to a mechanical issue. Flights delayed over 4 hours. Have mild issue with food voucher the airline gave us as an apology (admittedly my fault this time). Finally get on flight, get home, order uber to drive us home…. Uber stops moving even though it was just 4 mins away. Driver messages us and asks us to cancel. His car broke down in the parking lot. Second uber gets us home… at 2 am, 6 hours later than planned. We certainly felt cursed. So yeah I have basically no sleep or brain power to draft a real max the min.
So yeah, let’s talk curses! What are the nastiest ways to use them, and I’m talking offensively and potentially in other ways if you can figure out the cheese.