Stretching the truth is one thing but telling an outright lie is quite another. Better than both is the more common matter of exaggerating, especially when it comes to the questions-best-not-asked. Don't ask anybody their weight (mine is a tad under 30-pounds standard), his or her income (mine is about 30-pounds sterling), and you sure as heck don't ask a lady her age.

Okay, I'm not a lady, but the uncommonly common courtesy so obviously absent should still apply regardless of gender or age, since I think the "lady" status really doesn't start in the preschool age class anyway.

When it came time to book our airline tickets for this, our biggest office excursion of all-time (so far, and likely in the future too), they asked how old I was and we said I was not quite 2-years-old just yet. Thing is, if I said I was already three, it would have cost me a full, adult fare for my passage, even though I weigh a fraction of what other passengers do and I'm not even taking any luggage. It doesn't seem fair, if you think about it.

Besides, it's disrespectful to ask one's age, so I figured I could round it down by a bit, just a year and change and it wouldn't matter. It doesn't matter, right? Think about how many 29 or 39-year-olds are easily five-to-ten years older, and my 17-months of understatement seems hardly a matter of any consequence at all.

If you say that makes me unjust I say it isn't so. This is a very long, 2-leg flight, and they don't even offer discounts based on size, age or weight. Worst of all I have to sit on a parent's lap for the flight so call me crazy, but I'm crazier about keeping a week's worth of hotel cost in my coin purse than paying for a seat so big I hardly know what to do with it.

No child discounts? That's ten kinds of odd if you ask me, and you should, I have an opinion about it… it's that it's ten kinds of odd, and I can't even count that high.

Above - With as little as we all are, it's not like it's so bad, three of us in the space of two seats.

Besides, since it's technically a domestic flight (with Puerto Rico only lying "technically" outside the United States rather than literally) there's no need for the sorts of travel documents that would disprove my age. I don't have a passport (like Brendan does) and I don't even qualify for a driver's license, voter registration card or even a Costco membership card. I think I could get a Discover Card, but they usually leave those lying around on street corners so that can't count for much.

By merely understating my age in realistic, believable ways, we're able to trim literally hundreds of dollars off our budget, and there happens to be a little trick you can play to get the seat you need, assuming the flight isn't full.

Here's the trick. We're flying wide-body, and there's five seats across the middle section. We only need four of the seats (though that fifth one would be nice for the sake of me having my very own free, unpaid, surplus seat) so we skipped Priceline (who only offers "pretty okay" airfare with all kinds of family-unfriendly hitches along the way), and we also skipped Travelocity, Expedia and the rest of their ilk as well. We checked out all the rates and went straight to the airline for the rate, since it's the exact same price, but with seat-specific assignments freely available.

Again, remember, the middle set of seats is 5-wide, so we asked for two on the right and two on the left, with one empty, extra seat in the middle. It's not a window or an aisle, so nobody would specifically request it. Better still, the person who takes that seat would have to be traveling alone which betters our odds still.

So what happens is that, barring some clown flying solo at the last minute, there's a totally free, open seat, and the only way somebody will take it is if they pay slightly more than us to get a rock-bottom deal at Priceline… what a sucker! And if somebody does take the seat, and there's even a single free seat remaining anywhere on the plane at all, that person is going to relocate anywhere else on the plane at all, rather than sit in the mix of five people, mostly tiny, in just four seats. When Brendan, Daddy-O, MissLissa and Dane flew to China the handler-parent-man pulled the same trick, and it worked two out of the four flight legs.

I tell you people, between the lying and the connivery, we've got this whole airfare thing finagled down to a science. And well we should, not a single airline out there offers so much as a media discount or upgrade, no matter how grand your credentials, no matter how broad your readership base. It sounds like a bad idea on their part but it is, after all, those last minute flying journalists who likely make up the bulk of their income. Whatever, we'll get ours since they've already gotten theirs. Non-Refundable, by the way, and that's kind of weak too, but a whole other topic.

Above - In a perfect world, we'd be allowed to fly the plane ourselves, but no such luck.

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