Sticking it to the man

Freshman year of college, I dated a guy whose name rhymed with "Stan". He was a complete nutcase, but this is not about him, I only bring him up because he totalled both my car and my mother's car within a week and my sister coined him "[rhymes with Stan] [rhymes with Stan] the bad driving man".

Several years later, I started dating a guy who also had a first name that rhymed with Stan. He was attractive, ambitious, intelligent, highly-principled and had a very dry, sarcastic sense of humor that I loved--he was perfect for the first several months until I discovered his quirk: his life goal was to stick it to the man. Seriously, I have never met a person who liked to stick it to the man more than he did. And his preferred method of sticking it to the man was to simply stop patronizing "then man's" business. The list of places he wouldn't patronize was longer than the list of places he would. And he seriously thought that he could cause financial ruin to those businesses that crossed him.

At first it was sort of attractive that he was that highly principled because I am too (ask me why I only stay at Marriott-family hotels). Then it was somewhat obnoxious (mostly when he wouldn't take me to Target on a Saturday). As time passed, it ceased to be obnoxious and started to be a neverending source of entertainment, as in "how did you stick it to the man today babe?".

One time, we went back to the midwest for my girlfriend's wedding. She was from the same small town as my boyfriend so we made a long weekend out of it and spend some extra time with his family. He was supposed to fly back on a Monday afternoon and get home around 7PM but the boyfriend decided on Sunday afternoon that he wanted to get home earlier in the day so he called AirTran and asked if he could get on the 7AM flight. They only had business class seats available on that flight so it would have cost him about $400 to change flights.

Can I just transfer my coach ticket use my frequent flier points to upgrade to business class? No because you need a confirmed seat on the same flight to do that.

Can I use my frequent flier points to upgrade on my confirmed flight and transfer that ticket? No it doesn't work that way.

I should probably mention that we had a bunch of frequent flier points because a) we did a dual-city relationship for a while but mostly b) we had a AirTran credit card that we put a great deal of our credit card expenses on so we could get the points. Boyfriend saw these points as a negotiation tactic.

Well, you do realize that I will be cancelling my A+ rewards Visa card?

I've got to hand it to the customer service lady because in this situation she was about 10 times wittier than I could have been:

Well sir, the airline doesn't really lose anything if you don't use your frequent flier miles. That's a benefit reaped by the customer. So really, you are only punishing yourself. And the credit card is owned by a bank, AirTran doesn't get money from the card, it gets customer loyalty which is more important to its business model anyways. So I don't really care if you cancel your card.

The boyfriend was pretty deaf from spending too much time on the firing line which benefitted me in a great many ways: 1) I could make snarky comments under my breath and he never heard them, 2) I could discuss his Christmas present on the phone with my mom when he was across the room and he was still surprised on Christmas morning, and 3) he kept his phone turned up so loud I can hear it across the room. Therefore, I heard this exchange as clear as day and I started laughing my ass off. I may have actually shot beer out of my nose, I laughed so hard. Shocked that he got put in his place by a customer service rep, he quickly and politely ended the call. I immediately called sister and told her the whole story and he was quickly dubbed "[rhymes with Stan] [rhymes with Stan], stick it to the man".