Why I should not be your travel agent

Just before the Christmas break we had talked about me taking another trip to New Delhi to spend some time with the development team. I waited until after Christmas to book the flight so I could coordinate the dates with the church's annual congregational meeting. It seemed that it would be best if I were to leave on Jan 10 and return on Jan 28; that would get me back in time for the congregational meeting on the Jan 29. I booked my tickets and started to make the preparations to get my visa. Although I was cutting it a bit close, I knew that they were capable of processing a Indian business visa request in one day. We were also traveling to Burlington, ON and Napierville, QC over the holidays and I needed my passport to get back and forth across the border US-Canada border. I completed in the application, enclosed my passport and two shiny new passport pictures and sent them to the visa processing in New York using FedEx overnight delivery. They received the visa on Dec 31, but since Jan 1 was a holiday, the application was not sent to the Indian consulate until Monday Jan 4. This should still have left me with lots of time since I had prepaid for the return delivery of the passport with the visa. I checked the on-line system for the status of my visa every day that week. When Thursday passed and there was no progress on my visa I started to get worried. On Friday morning, I called the visa processing center and confirmed that even if my visa was processed on that day, it would miss the delivery cut-off and would not go out until Monday Jan 11 with a delivery on Tuesday Jan 12 - two days after my flight was scheduled to leave. I called Expedia see if I could rebook my British Airways flight for later in the week on account of my visa not being ready. They said that it would cost me $1750 to change my ticket. The original ticket was only $1300, so that seemed a little steep. Convinced that this could not be correct, I called Exedia several times that morning and asked the same question and consistenly got the same answer, so it appears that they were really serious about this. I called the visa processing center again and they made some encouraging sounds in that although there were no guarantees, there was a good probability that my visa would be ready later that day. On that meager hope, I asked them to hold my visa for pick-up instead of shipping it back via FedEx and booked a ticket for the next flight to New York. An hour later I was at Boston Logan airport and while waiting for my flight, I got an email from British Airways saying that they had already canceled my Sunday evening flight from Boston to Heathrow due to severe winter weather in the UK. That was great news, but I was already in the airport holding a non-refundable ticket to New York. I got to JFK at about 3:30 pm and took the subway into Manhattan and was at the visa processing center before 5 pm and queued up behind all the other people picking up their visas. When my turn came I gave them my request number and they used that to check the status of my visa. It was not done! All I could do was go home. I walked back outside into the rapidly darkening cold winter air and headed for the first Starbucks to recover and refuel. I dejectedly got back on the subway and headed back to the airport. As I got off the subway to take the airtrain to the terminal, I got another email on my iPhone saying that my visa was ready for pickup! It was now after 6 pm and the office was closed so heading back downtown was out of the question. My guess is that it had been delivered by the consulate to the visa processing center that afternoon but since their on-line data had not yet been updated, they did not know that they had it. If I had just given my name and had them search the box they would have found it, but since I had helpfully given the the visa request reference number they just checked on-line and said "not here".
I had booked the last flight out for the evening and did not get home until after midnight. So now I had neither passport nor a booked flight to India.
On Saturday, I called Expedia again, and asked to rebook my flight. At first they told me that I would not have to pay the re-booking fee of $250 but would have to pay the difference in fare. My guess was that this was going to cost me about $1500! They changed their mind about this , and agreed to rebook me for a Jan 13 flight without additional costs. On Monday I called the visa processing center again, and they confirmed that my visa was ready for pick-up. I managed to convince them to go back to the original instructions and FedEx the visa to me so that I would have it on Tuesday. To my great surprise they quickly agreed agreed and I soon got the email confirmation. By Tuesday afternoon at 3 pm, I had a passport with visa and ticket and was all set to fly on Wednesday morning with 18 hours to spare!
I think I will renew my visa a little earlier the next time.