It's Wednesday. Where am I?

This trip that I'm currently on, this 20 country sojourn to all corners of the world has been a great test to my last minute, slackadasical, planning-is-for-wusses travel style (which, thanks to the magical inter-web isn't the million-dollar-last-minute-booking-penalty nightmare that it used to be. In fact, in some cases, my complete lack of organizational skills has saved me a penny or two).
While things have been pretty smooth so far, I'm starting to notice the cracks. I arrived in Fiji a couple of weeks ago only to be informed that I would need an onward visa to Kiribati before they would let me on the plane, despite the assurances of the Canadian travelers website. So I was trapped in Fiji for a couple of days (many have pointed out that there are far worse places to be stranded). However, true to form, after a 4 hour bus ride to Suva I sorted out my visa in 15 minutes and secured a warm bed and hot shower at a stranger's house for my first unplanned night, caught up with an old room-mate, and then went and crashed with another friend before finally flying out for Kiribati two days late. All this despite never having been to Fiji before.
Or take my recent departure from Australia. I was in Brisbane as part of a 4 day/ 6 flight journey from Tarawa, Kiribati to Ulan Bataar, Mongolia (I'm sitting in Beijing, waiting to board the final flight to Ulan).
Anyway, my quest for the cheapest tickets meant that the whole trip was cobbled together from internet e-tickets, a travel agent in Brisbane and another agent in Kuala Lumpur, so when i arrived at the airport in Brisbane, ready to fly to KL and pick up my ticket to Ulan, I was told that, while I had a ticket out of Kuala Lumpur, travelers to Malaysia need proof of an onward ticket and unless I had physical proof of that ticket, they weren't going to let me on the plane.
I've long since learned that arguing this stuff, no matter how mistaken they may be (ok, technically they were right but in practice the onward ticket thing is a non-issue in Malaysia) is far more trouble than it's worth. So here I was, 90 minutes before my flight, with two eager baggage toting, form filling friends (who were beginning to show sleep-deprivation giddiness with one of them referring to them both as my 'minions') as my airport escorts, asking the Malaysian Airlines reps what I needed to do to get on the plane.

Malaysian Airlines Rep: Well, you just need to show us physical proof of an onward flight from Malaysia.
Me: Any flight?
MAR: Yes, any flight.
Me: Is there any internet access around here?

Brisbane international airport has no wifi (or none that I could find) but it does have a series of over-priced internet kiosks with broken mice and sticky keyboards strewn about the departures floor to steal your coins and mock your attempts to type. The catch of course is that once a ticket is booked on one of the infernal machines, how to show them? Drag the kiosk over to the ticket counter? Have them all come over and huddle around the machine? Brains were stormed, I toyed with the idea of shooting a photo of the confirmation screen and show it to them on my camera, but as luck would have it, one of the coin-stealing kiosks, tucked in a corner way at the back of the airport, has a printer plugged into it.
But time was quickly running out, so coins were inserted, keys were pounded, temperamental mouse buttons were sworn at, and I managed to book myself an Airasia ticket to Bangkok (I needed the ticket anyway, for my return from Mongolia, I just hadn't planned on booking it yet). Once I reached the confirmation screen, I pushed print, looked expectantly at the printer and... nothing.
cables were wiggled, little doors were opened and closed, more buttons were pushed and printers were even knocked about. still nothing.
It was at this point that airport escort #1 (and self-declared minion) stepped in and managed, in an effort to kick start the printer, to shut the whole kiosk down. The screen went blank, the computer rebooted and the printer remained silent.
Time was disastrously short and didn't really have much of a back-up plan. I was just beginning to accept that I may, in fact, be stuck in Brisbane for another day when the printer, no doubt pleased with its dramatic pause, sprang to life and began spewing forth printed pages of confirmed bookings of onward flights. Unfortunately, they weren't MY onward flights. Oh, and did I mention there were only 4 sheets of paper in the printer? right.
Of course, since I'm not typing this post from Brisbane, you all know that when that last piece of paper shot out of the printer, it had a reservation for an Air Asia flight from KL to Bangkok with my name on it. I grabbed my bags and ran back to the ticket counter to collect my boarding pass, minions in tow, with mere minutes to spare.

(footnote: I'm finally getting this post up after having sit on my computer for a couple of weeks. I'm currently stranded in Miami, having spent the past 24 hours here waiting for a flight to La Paz. I left Tel Aviv yesterday morning, flew to Madrid, missed my connection to Miami, was rerouted to New York where the connecting flight to Miami was delayed and by the time I arrived here I had missed my flight to La Paz by less than 30 minutes. After spending the night in an airport hotel (where I had to wash my unmentionables in the bathroom sink as my checked bag is still in airline custody) I'm back at the airport, ready to go.)