I have a brother who’s an only child. Really, he is. Since he lives in another state, it’s only natural for him to get lonely sometimes, yet traveling back and forth to see his family on a regular basis tends to upset his bill collectors. Visits as a result have been kept to a minimum, except for those occasions where I’m able to loan him some cash for a ticket, or when his collectors haven’t learned his new alias yet.

Since he expressed a desire to visit just last week, I’ve been checking out cFares for cheap tickets that didn’t cost the price of rare blood to purchase. While their searches are pretty extensive and helped me dig out some of the lowest airfares around, it may not have been reasonable for me to expect to find tickets for cross country trips for say, $20.

I called up my brother. “Dude, can’t you just drive?”

“Nah man, my car can’t handle a trip like that.”

“Great.”

I went back to cFares and dug some more. “Let’s see, $300, $291, $315, ah man…”

I called him back up.

“Why don’t you just sign up for the Platinum membership cFares offers? You might be able to get better deals this way.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a membership service that promises access to better fares than what you might find on other sites. You can try it free for 30 days. Couldn’t hurt to try and see how much better the prices really are.”

“Yeah but how much do you have to pay after that, $1,000??”

“Nah, it’s only $50 a year. Might be worth it.”

“Mmmm, $50 is still a lot…”

“Oh please, it’s only $4 a month, stop being such a weenie. Just check it out and let me know if you found any good prices.”

I heard from him again the next day.

“Wow, Linc, there’s some pretty good prices here for Ireland!”

“………… what? You were supposed to look for cheap airfare to come HERE.”

“Oh… yeah, I was doing that too. I was just curious about Ireland, you know you can stop over in London too for a few hours? That’s awesome!”

“Since when did you get interested in Ireland all of a sudden? You don’t drink.”

“I know, but I met this cute Irish girl on Match.com and we really hit—”

I hung up on him.