Slingshot

I’m in Heathrow on my way to the Seychelles via Zurich.  It’s a roundabout way of getting there, but it was much cheaper than the direct flights.

I’m going to experience long-haul economy class for the first time in a year.  It will no doubt be good for the soul.  I’m always breathless with admiration at people who stomach sardine-like conditions to go on a journey.  That doesn’t mean I want to be one of them.

I managed to miss the train to London this morning.  I had a very good reason for being late, but it wasn’t the kind of reason you can share with the check-in staff so I simply pleaded for mercy and they changed my ticket at no extra cost.  Usually Eurostar staff just look at you stonily and force you to buy a new ticket.  I must have looked particularly worthy of special consideration this morning.  If only I could figure out how to bottle that…

Something about holidays makes me a little too happy to spend money.  Without really thinking about it too hard, I went and bought the Panasonic camera I’ve been coveting these past 6 months in duty free.  It wasn’t a smart thing to buy on the grounds that I already have two digital cameras, one of which is quite compact and the other takes excellent pictures.  But the LUMIX range of Panasonics is better than both of my other cameras combined (I’ve seen the pictures it takes) so I wanted it.  If I had thought for a little, I would undoubtedly have talked myself out of it, although I can’t seem to feel unhappy about the purchase.

I also bought the maximum allowable amount of alcohol for import into the Seychelles, the better to ensure the boat has everything it needs for a satisfactory cruise.

We’ve heard that the seas are quite rough around the Seychelles at the moment.  People already on site over there are telling us that there are 4m swells and 25kts winds, which is not particularly pleasant when the main objective is to relax, spend time with friends and take advantage of secluded coves and beaches.  We’re not there for competition sailing.  I hope the weather works out well for us, it would be tragic to go so far and find ourselves struggling through difficult days of sailing when we really just want to kick back, relax and watch the sun go down in all the most beautiful places in the islands.

I’ve been looking forward to this trip for a long time, and it’s finally here.  Sitting in a busy and air-conditioned Terminal 2, it doesn’t feel like I’m about to be basking in sunshine, but I’m sure I’ll be more in touch with it once I arrive in Mahé.  Assuming I manage to stand after being folded into a seat the size of a dog kennel for several hours.

Every year, the holiday phenomenon catches me by surprise.  Having worked most of my life in the service industry, and in England, this continental month-long siesta that everyone takes in July/August is something of a mystery.

The way it works is, everyone positions themselves early in the year so that they have a maximum of time off during the month of August, and then suddently there’s this great big sucking sound as they all disappear to the south of France for the holidays.  The office building I work in is now completely empty, and the teams I generally work with are all somewhere else, which makes my work problematic at best and impossible most of the time.

Of course the rest of us who unwittingly ended up working during the holiday period (because someone needs to be there to answer the phone and explain where everyone’s gone) have to find some way of using our holiday allowance at some other point in the year.  But that can be difficult, because everyone else expects you to be present during the rest of the year, and short of taking a large number of long weekends or desperately trying to squeeze in a week here or there, it can get quite difficult to actually use up your holiday allowance if you missed the opportunity to burn through the bulk of it during the appropriate period.

The most amusing aspect from my point of view is how “urgent” items still need to be dealt with as quickly as they otherwise would have been, but the complete absence of anyone you can refer to for the relevant information or the appropriate expertise makes it impossible, so you spend most of the month composing elaborate excuses and apologies to far flung counterparties who work in countries where, during the month of August, people … um … work.

Far be it from me to stand in the way of hundreds of years of continental habit.  Personally I think the sooner I get my head around this holiday thing and join the rest of them in St. Tropez the better.  In addition, it’s actually technically illegal (or so I’m told) not to take two consecutive weeks off during the summer period.  What a grand idea!  But I’m not sure if I’m the one breaking the law if I don’t take the time off, or if it’s my company.

My one week off is coming up in a few days and I expect to come back tanned and happy from the Seychelles, even if I’m only taking a week off…

Corporate policy dictates that we fly to Niamey from France in economy class.  This is the second time I come to Niger on this flight.

Because of the frequent traveller advantages, I get a few privileges in the airport – quicker check-in, shorter queues at passport control and security, and access to an executive lounge.  These advantages are nice but in no way essential to the perfect travelling experience.  The real privilege is not guaranteed, and you only find out if you have been lucky enough to get it when you arrive at the gate.

You hand your boarding pass to the girl, the piece of paper that tells you you’re in row 67, seat G, between a sumo wrestler and a 55-year-old donut lover with a snoring problem, and the girl passes the fancy bar/dot code in front of a scanner.  If you’re lucky today, the machine beeps angrily, and flashes up a message that says “Classe Incohérente” – basically meaning that your class of travel is “incoherent”, or doesn’t make sense.  Then it spits out another boarding pass, and lo and behold you are now in seat 5A, with a glass of champagne and the greatest luxury of all, leg room.

What drives it is not really a desire to please me, but a desire to move people from an overcrowded economy class cabin into an almost-empty business class cabin.

It’s one of those moments that somehow manages to make the drudge of spending so much time in planes and airports and hotels and security lines seem completely irrelevant, and I end up feeling like I’m really special.  Yes, it’s childish.  Yes, it’s an unfair privilege.  Yes, it makes me absurdly happy.

I’m not a great fan of poor service.  I have to deal with an awful lot of it and it never gets any easier.

Airlines are very prone to bad service.  You can imagine how it happens : when something goes wrong, hundreds of unhappy passengers descend on the three unprepared and unwitting employees managing the front desk while the executives that set the business up to fail watch from a safe distance, secure in the knowledge that this will not cost them very much because the three customer service representatives are not empowered to provide the customers with any service.

Delta is the kind of airline where this will occasionally happen.  And it happened to me.

Knowing it’s Delta and their check-in tends to take 45 minutes per passenger, I arrived two-and-a-half hours early for my Boston -> New York flight.  I then checked in with the automated machines, and was directed to a queue to check in my bag.  It was at this point that I noticed that the bag check queue was several times as long as the queue for manual check-in.  I tried to change lanes, but was informed that since I had already checked in, I had to stay in this queue.  I thought self-service check-in was supposed to make things efficient, but not in Delta-land.

The plane had that run-down, barely-managed-to-clean-it-in-time look and smell that you so often get on internal US flights.  We took off on time and landed 40 minutes early.  How did this happen?  Delta know they’re very often late, and since leaving on time is so complicated, they just add an hour to their flight schedule so they can claim they arrived on time.

We landed, and then spent 90 minutes waiting for our gate to be free so that we could get off the damn plane.  We landed 40 minutes early, and left the plane 50 minutes late.  Passengers were on the verge of knocking the pilot’s door down and throttling him, partly due to the frustration of missing connecting flights when you’re already on the ground, and partly due to the complete lack of information we were getting.  Delta treats its customers like mushrooms : Keep them in the dark and feed them on shit.

Finally off the plane and really really grumpy, I made my way to the baggage claim, where bags began coming out… but not mine.  So I go to the lost luggage counter and give them my ticket, and ask where my bag is… and they tell me it’s still in Boston.

How is this possible?  I ask.  I checked in 2 hours before take-off.

They took it off the plane because the plane was overloaded, they reply.

There’s so much wrong with that statement I don’t know where to start.  No doubt they were carrying freight and they if the freight doesn’t get to where its going, they don’t get paid, whereas throwing all my belongings out doesn’t cost them a dime since the chances I was a previously satisfied customer is verging on nil.  It is Delta after all.

They promise to delvier the bag to my address sometime the following day, and offer me a courtesy kit (toothpaste, toothbrush, underwear, that sort of thing) before realising they’ve run out and sending me away with nothing.

The bag arrived the following day, and had a little tag attached to it that read, “Perfect Delivery”.  I shit you not.  Delta doesn’t have much in the way of intelligence at the top of the company, the name inspires thoughts of the dumbest third of a second-rate sorority, but they still seem to have a sense of irony.