Thank you for booking with our esteemed airline. We can confirm that you purchased a flight ticket to Cleveland on December 21. But that’s more or less it.

We can’t confirm that we have an aircraft available to fly the route, so that means we can’t confirm the departure time of 7:05 a.m. on your ticket, but don’t worry. We can confirm you pressed enter and that your ticket is valid. Here’s the confirmation number in case you need it for reference. We can confirm it has three sixes and two zeros followed by the letters F and U.

Just come to the airport on time, because we can confirm that we will require you to sit around waiting while we find a replacement crew for the previous flight scheduled to leave from the same gate as yours. We can also confirm we won’t send you a flight delay alert before you wake up your three kids at 4:00 a.m. shrieking, “GET UP! GET UP! We can’t miss our flight.” We can also confirm that the second you reach the airport, you will see the new estimated departure time displayed.

We can’t confirm that this new departure time will be correct, but we can confirm that you are at the airport cursing and vowing never to fly our airline again. We can confirm you will, in fact, book with us in the future because we can confirm the compensation is not in cash but in flight vouchers.

However, we can’t confirm that these flight vouchers will apply to any flights you might be interested in.

We can’t confirm there will be seats for you to sit and wait for your new, new, new updated departure time. We can confirm we removed a bunch of loungers during the pandemic when no one was flying and replaced them with an art installation that looks like a giant, stuck-out tongue.

We can’t confirm where your checked bags are currently being held, so, no, you can’t retrieve them for the medicine you need to take again today. We can confirm you assumed you’d be at your destination by now, so that’s why you didn’t pack it in your carry-on. We can confirm the flight won’t fly bags without their matching passenger. On second look, we can confirm your bags are currently in Iceland. Can we confirm your destination address again? Here’s a pen with invisible ink, and here’s a copy of War and Peace from our airport shop. Underline the appropriate words in the book to describe your luggage. We can confirm we won’t be looking for it.

If you see a gate outside, that’s great. We just can’t confirm it leads to an actual aircraft. It most likely leads to a seventh dimension where everyone has smiley balloons instead of faces. Though we can’t confirm that. We can, however, confirm that when you walk up to the counter and ask for flight status updates, you will only hear words like “La-la-la-la-la-la.” We can confirm your face has transformed into a rubber glove that’s slowly inflating. We can confirm that the popping sound is your anger. But we will check our plane’s landing gear in case it’s one of the wheels.

We can confirm that all these confirmations will take at least four hours. But we can’t confirm we won’t board you before this. In the third hour, the seat backs will warp into hissing cobras when you blink. You might start scratching from the venom. We can confirm you’re THAT tired. But we can’t confirm those aren’t actual cobras we picked up somewhere in Arizona. We’ll have to do another cleaning just in case. Also, we’ll have to deplane you.

It’s going to take so long that we can’t confirm your destination will exist any longer. So don’t get upset if you get rerouted mid-flight to a city currently experiencing chupacabra sightings.

We can confirm you’re getting very upset, and we can confirm there’s nothing we can do about it. Oh, and we can also confirm that those “check-in online to save time at the airport” reminder emails were just for kicks.