Slingshot

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.

Famous.  Last.  Words.

The flight back from Namibia was supposed to leave at 20:25 on Friday, which would have had us flying through the night and arriving in Paris some time in the morning.  But… a little experience goes a long way, once bitten twice shy and all that… with the benefit of our previous experience with this airline, we called the airport to see if the flight would be taking off on time.

It wasn’t.

The flight was scheduled to arrive at 01h45, offload passengers, and “if all goes well” take off again around 03h00.  6 hours and 15 minutes late.

I reacted in the only manner that seemed appropriate.  I went to the hotel bar and ordered a beer.

Tuesday’s delay – when we had an overnight stay in Frankfurt inflicted upon us – had never been caught up by the airline, and the plane had continued flying seriously overdue all week rather than cancel a couple of flights and refund a couple of hundred passengers.

As it happens, our tickets were incorrectly entered into the airline booking system, so we had a nice 20-minute wait as an exhausted and frustrated airline employee tapped manically away at a terminal that had probably been installed sometime in the 1970s.  Finally equipped with boarding passes, we went through customs and sat in the business lounge, where a rather large man had passed out on one of the couches and was snoring so loud I thought my beer glass was going to shatter.

Thankfully, that was the last of our problems, and once on the plane, it left at the new time of 03h00 for Frankfurt, where we arrived in one piece (although the landing was more like a handbrake turn than a gentle touchdown).  Once in Germany, everything worked with predictable efficiency and we were soon on a plane to Paris.

Namibian Desert Landscape – from Panoramio

I was in Namibia a couple of weeks ago and was served the most awesome steak on a South African Airlines flight from Johannesburg to Windhoek.  How do you get awesome steak on a flight?  In-between the second and third mouthful, I looked across the aisle to my right to see if the gentleman sitting in the window seat over there was having the same experience I was.  We looked at each other in amazement, as if to say, “I know… What the hell?”.

Namibia was interesting.  Instead of getting driven to Swakopmund as I usually do, I was given the keys by the employee that has previously held the ungrateful task of ferrying me across the desert with the excuse that he had VAT returns to be getting on with, and I could please drive myself this time thank you very much.

Driving across the desert isn’t as romantic as it sounds.  There’s a very modern tarmac road laid down and you can drive very fast – although I had to do a couple of interesting manoeuvers to avoid some baboons who wanted to play chicken.  The scenery is wonderful though – Namibia is amazing in this way.  You start amid heavyish greenery and trees, and as you drive west, the vegtetation becomes gradually more sparse.  Soon you’re driving through brush and scrubland, and then a little under an hour away from the coast, it turns into real desert.  Then you get to Swakopmund and the desert throws itself into the Atlantic ocean.  Cool.

Modern technology is amazing.  Given the virtual office, GPRS and wireless networks, long-life batteries and lightweight laptops, you can be absolutely anywhere in the world and your equipment can still let you down.  There is nowhere in the world safe from malfunction, because you carry the means of your frustration with you.  Long ago, you needed to be in the office for something technological to go wrong, but now, it can happen to you anywhere.  My computer picked my trip to Namibia to die on me.  It didn’t just die though, that would have been far too simple.  Instead it started failing on an irregular and unpredictable basis.  It would work for three hours and then the power would cut just when you had finally cracked a really difficult clause in a contract, or finally sorted the spreadsheet calculation that just wouldn’t spit out the right number.  Suddenly, the screen goes black, and you find yourself hitting the space bar as though it was going to bring back the information that just disappeared in a puff of dissipating electrons.

Afterwards, when you’d try to restart the computer, it would crash every 11 minutes.  Then, just before you go to bed at some intolerable hour of the morning, it starts working perfectly, and you don’t dare stop working now because for all you know it won’t start again for 3 days, so you just have to start working through the two hundred urgent emails you received in case this is your last chance this week.  You go to bed at four, and the next day, the computer works fine, but you don’t need it any more and you can’t see straight anyway.