Okay, so that was a touch of a click-baity title, but they sort of did donate Steem to my account in a very round about way.

A few weeks ago, I was travelling to Leipzig for a set of concerts, and for whatever reason, the orchestra management thought it was best that we fly to Berlin and then get on a coach for the rest of the journey to Leipzig. Well, I'm not one to ask questions about these sort of things, I'm the one that will just happily board whatever mode of transport that I'm pointed to, immerse myself in writing or gaming and then pop my head up when we arrive at the hotel.

However, on the day of the travel, for some reason our flight was cancelled. The official reason that was given was that there was no crew for the plane, which I guess is code for something else, seeing as you probably should remember to schedule a crew to help fly the plane? Anyway, I'm not really one to complain at length (unlike some other colleagues), and so I found myself writing and gaming on the airport floor instead of in a bus seat... Not really that big a change.

Wikimedia Commons

Anyway, fast forward a couple of weeks to this week, and one of my work mates told me that I could claim compensation for a cancelled/delayed flight. Apparently, there is an EU Law that goes by the name Flight Compensation Regulation 261/2004 which states that if I have a flight cancelled/delayed (by over 2 hours) or overbooked and denied boarding, then I can claim compensation of between 250-600 euro!

I had heard of this law before, but I've never really tried to claim it. I just figure if they book me on a different flight then I don't really care. However, this time I thought, why not? The orchestra had paid for the tickets, and they wouldn't claim it, so I figure I may as well fight the good fight and ask for what is my rights under EU law!

Actually, I could say it was compensation for staying at a really really crappy hotel, having to wake up really early in the morning for my rebooked flight and having the worst dinner in my life! Seriously, you could have thrown the chicken through a window... it had the consistency of a brick, and I'm not exaggerating... much.

Pexels

I filled out the online form for the compensation twice with no response (I had a few days between each attempt), and so I was going to give up on it. However, a friend told me she had hers responded to within the day, and had received a bank transfer within the week. So, I figured I was doing something wrong.

Yes, the problem turned out to be the fact that I was using a mobile browser. After submitting the form, you needed to do another confirmation, which on a mobile browser was outside the viewing area, and so looked like a blank screen. So, I redid the process on a laptop and got a response within the day. Approved, for a short trip within the EU, compensation was 250 euro. FREE MONEY!!!!! I haven't felt this happy since all the Bitcoin airdrops!

Anyway, I bounced it straight out to a fiat-crypto exchange and today it cleared. First thing was it headed straight out to Binance as ETH, and then straight onto the ETH-STEEM market. Seeing as it wasn't really expected money, I traded it at the spot rate (STEEM is pretty low at the moment anyway).