A zero for an "o"

I should be in Seattle now. Going for a walk, meeting my mate Andy Jassy for a coffee in Starbucks, touristing hard for a few hours before my last flight of a long, long journey to my favorite city in the world.

And yet, here I am, still in Valencia for 3 more weeks.

Turns out I have been reading and typing my passport wrongly since I got it last year. I was mistaking an "O" for a "0" (zero).

I have believed that my passport ID has a 0 on it for 9 months.

And with this information, I applied for visas for Canada and Saudi Arabia (meaning using the zero in my passport) and somehow I got into both countries and no one told me anything about the mistake... 🙄🤦‍♀️

Anyway, I applied for my ESTA for the US layover and, obviously, I did it by typing my passport as I had done in the last 9 months: with a zero. But then, this morning at 5 am, the check-in assistant scanned my passport and announced I did not have any ESTA linked to it.

She knew straight away, before even checking the paperwork I had printed, that I had mistaken the O for a zero. "It happens all the time", she said.

A silly mistake that happens all the time, but I still didn't have an ESTA and therefore I couldn't board the flight.

The check-in assistant was polite and effective despite the stress of the situation and she quickly called someone to try and find me a new flight.

I guess is a good thing not having a job yet. Not really having anything to go to allowed me to be more flexible with the dates so I wouldn't have to pay 1800€ to book a new flight (on top of what I had already paid).

It wasn't 1800€ in the end, but it was still a lot of money, and if you know me, you probably know I stress about money a lot. Plus, I was sure my work visa for Canada was also done with the wrong passport number.

So I've been having a lot of very harmful self-dialogue, doubts, insecurities, guilt...

The whole package.

So today has been hard.

Anyway, I don't have a layover in the US anymore, I got a new eTA for Canada with the right passport number, and I think I shouldn't have issues with the work permit (but this is only my assumptions, I don't know it a 100% for sure yet, and I don't know if I will before reaching there).

Now I basically feel hopeless, unworthy, and a failure.

But I'm trying to also see the positive things or at least the ways that it could be worse 😅 And that maybe this is what is meant to be. Maybe I needed this extra time to find or learn something special.

I guess we will see in 3 weeks 👀