What happens when you cancel a cancellation?

I'm returning to Toronto today after a few days in Vancouver. You will recall that there were some, er, events surrounding the outbound leg of this trip; see my previous entry for that.

My few days in Vancouver were unremarkable overall. I wound up doing more work and, consequently, less play than I would have liked, but I was able to take my rented Mustang (!!) out for a couple of nice runs. I got the car back to the nice rental people, got into the departure area of the terminal at YVR, only to discover that my flight was - you guessed it - delayed by an hour. For the second time in a row, it was due to "maintenance issues" with the aircraft.

Now, I'm all for not flying in messed-up airframes. When the agent at the check-in counter told me it was a "flight control" issue, the image of the Weasleys' flying car from the Harry Potter books zoomed through my head. Not the sort of thing I want to be dealing with with a few hundred of my closest friends in an Airbus A340, no sirree. I'll wait for the plane that isn't possessed by gremlins, thank you very much.

I went into the Maple Leaf lounge, where the announcement was made shortly thereafter that my flight was being cancelled altogether. There are plenty of other flights from Vancouver to Toronto, we'll get you onto one of them, I was told. So I left my boarding pass at the desk and went back to drafting my blog about delayed flights.

Less than a half-hour later, I was paged to return to the desk, where my original boarding pass was given back to me. "It's fixed now" was the simple, albeit not completely satisfying answer.

That's when I looked around for Q/Mr. Mxyzptlk/Stephen Hawking/Carl Sagan; someone - anyone - who could explain the bizarro universe into which I had obviously just been sucked. How often does something get cancelled, and then un-cancelled? That's gotta leave a mark on the fabric of the space-time continuum...

When I asked what the exact nature of the original problem was, the agent wasn't able to tell me. So, in about an hour, I'll step onto an airplane with a (hopefully) repaired flight-control issue. If you read something in the newspaper about an airplane that's stuck flying in circles - in reverse - somewhere over the Prairies, that will be me. I just hope we don't run into any Whomping Willows.