34 years ago on November 6, I was born. My plan for this year was simple: fly out to Bangkok because my buddy Egor is there for just 10 days, and timing-wise the 6th worked out so we could still hang out and celebrate.
I have a bad habit of showing up to airports right on the edge, but this time I actually arrived on time. By 10:25 AM—45 minutes before departure—I was checked in, holding both boarding passes (SGN → DAD and DAD → BKK), and my 10 kg bag (VN 032070) was already loaded into the plane.
What I didn't expect was that the check-in staff would freeze up for 30 minutes trying to figure out what to do with my acoustic guitar because of the Da Nang layover. Basically, the domestic leg to Da Nang is free in the cabin, and then you have to pay for the international leg. They spent so long debating that piece of paper and making calls that no matter how fast I ran afterward, the gate closed right in front of my face.
The hilarious part? They loaded my suitcase onto the plane, and then unloaded it. Think about the logic: letting me step onto the plane sitting right there is "impossible," but digging through the cargo hold to pull my bag back out is totally doable. Pure comedy.
I walked back to the counter, and that’s where the real circus started. I just asked them straight up: "Okay, what do I do now? Any advice?"
First, they tried playing ping-pong with me between the check-in desk and the ticket office. Part of the problem was some K-pop concert happening in Bangkok, so flights were packed. There were seats left, just in Business Class—and nobody wanted to take responsibility for upgrading me over their own screw-up. Instead, they casually offered to sell me Business Class for 10 million VND (~$400–500), and later "dropped" it to 7.5 million (~$370), which would’ve literally left me with zero cash upon landing.
Meanwhile, the girl at the counter realized someone was going to get blamed for offloading a checked-in passenger's bag. So she handed me an internal "Late Show Up" form (VSOP-F1.5) claiming I arrived at the counter at 11:38 AM—28 minutes after the plane took off. I snapped a photo. A minute and a half later, it clicked for her that you can't have printed boarding passes and loaded luggage if you showed up after takeoff. She walked back over and—right under the security cameras—scribbled a 10 over the 11 in ballpoint pen to make it 10:38. I photographed that too.
We spent hours in this bureaucratic standoff. At one point I asked:
"Can I take a photo of your badge?"
"No, security rules."
"Okay, show me the security rules so I can check."
Another girl actually sent me an 80-page regulations PDF trying to prove I wasn't allowed in "security zones"—except we were standing at a public check-in counter. Naturally, I fed the 80-page PDF straight into Gemini, which immediately dug up even more rules they were violating. And since I couldn't photograph the badge, I just said, "Fine, hold it up, I'll write it down by hand."
Having learned from a friend's run-in with local bureaucracy before, I knew yelling or confronting them gets you nowhere. Here, the whole system runs on fear of losing face: the managers who actually make decisions hide in the back room and never show themselves, while the front-desk staff are terrified of both their bosses and me. Total gridlock.
So instead of arguing, I packaged the facts—the boarding passes, the luggage tag, and the 11:38 → 10:38 pen edit—into a clean web page so the Terminal 2 supervisors could read it easily. When they opened the link, they genuinely panicked and thought it was an official airline portal, because on paper it's physically impossible to be a "late show" with tagged luggage already in the hold.
And then I walked into the classic trap at the ticket office: they put me in front of a genuinely sweet middle-aged lady who was trying her absolute best to help me, while the invisible bosses in the back told me to fuck off through her over the phone. You end up stuck in front of a kind person with zero authority, so I couldn't even be mad at her.
I burned my entire birthday in that terminal for nothing, quietly building the escalated version of the site (vietair.pages.dev)—protecting the front-desk girls while putting the forged timestamps and live regulator access logs on blast.
Anyway, I’m flying out today. On a Thai airline.