Airline Reservations Rant

Yeah, that's the way I feel sometimes.
Several months of operating a muffler-less chain saw... years of riding noisy motorcycles... and 40 years of operating turbine helicopters, (even with proper hearing protection), have taken their toll on my hearing. So it really seems to me the Airlines have conspired to frustrate me in this stage of my life!

We leave for a week in Hawaii with beloved classmates on 1 November. We'll be flyin' to Mesa to spend the night with Big Bubba, then he will accompany us to Hawaii for the week. Through a mis-communication, we ended up making our reservations separately. Although we are traveling to Honolulu on the same airplane, we didn't insure we would be seated together.
I decided to remedy that situation this morning.

Our reservations were through Priceline.com. Our flight was booked on ATA. That presents a problem all its' own, 'cause those folks don't talk to one another. But the most irritating thing is that when you dial an 800 number these days you can just about bet you'll get someone that speaks English with a wonderful, lilting accent. If they are a soft-speaking individual, this tired old hearing-impaired Fart simply cannot understand what is being said at the other end of the line.
I got put on hold, and the music they played during that interim was loud enough to be heard across the room when I laid the phone down!
Why can't the customer service reps speak at the same volume as the "hold" music?

Gettin' old's a bitch!