Flying Lift Airlines was a real downer

I had a pretty solid reason to be in seat 1A in the form of a confirmed boarding pass. I am 1.98 m tall and I get really bad lower back pain when I try to fold myself into a small airline seat. But it seems that booking and paying 3 months ahead and checking in early to book an exit row seat means nothing to Lift airlines and nor does my crippling lower back pain. At the boarding gate I was shown another passengers discarded printed boarding pass with the letters 4E scratched out and the words 1A written over it. And I was told that due to an “offline booking glitch”, I was now in 4E because another passenger had paid for seat 1A a month earlier and I had to move. No believable explanation was given and the issue was not fixed. From that point on any time I asked for a better explanation I would just get a shrug of shoulders and a look of indifference into the middle distance. An airline that really does not care about making things right. The flight to Cape Town a week earlier was also not without its own surprises. You can’t phone an actual person/customer service line after you book and pay. Email only. So if you need to change a flight a week before flying (Like I did) then good luck. There is nothing quick or easy about the transaction. It cost an extra R1000 to change the flight over emails. I was really hoping for a new and competitive airline to enter the market but clearly I was wrong.