A word you hear a lot when people are explaining Japanese culture to you is “contrast”.  It’s in their architecture, their food, their interior design, their lifestyles.  A black cup on a white saucer.  Sushi, green tea and miso soup all at the same time.  Youth disguised as teddy bears in a city park surrounded by ancient Japanese religious monuments.  There are few blends here, and many stark contrasts.

At first, there seems to be a sort of brutality to the juxtaposition of such completely different things, but you soon come to realise that the Japanese aesthetic is all about contrasts, and it’s really very elegant in its own way.

In two days, I discovered plenty of these contrasts, and realised that they are for me a large part of what makes Tokyo such an extraordinary place to be.

Everything works as planned in Tokyo.  At least that’s the appearance it gives to casual visitors like me.  The metro system is metronomic in its efficiency, when you reserve at a restaurant you are expected to show up at the time you reserved for, and when Tokyoites cross the road, they all do so simultaneously, and they keep within the pedestrian crossings. This last point is all the more remarkable given quite how many people can be crossing the road at the same time.  Within a day of being there, I started unconsciously behaving the same way, being scrupulous about crossing the road only once the lights had changed, and only where I was supposed to.  I expect there may be something to the broken windows theory after all.

I spent most of my weekend either eating or walking the city.  I thought it would be rude to whip out my camera and start taking pictures in the restaurant, but I had a particularly pleasant experience at SushiZanmai where I finally managed to see for myself what people mean when they tell you Sushi is just better in Japan.  Never have I eaten sushi this good, this fresh, this plentiful or this cheap.  What we get in Paris compares very poorly with the flavour, the freshness, and in particular the helpings that you get at this very standard sushi restaurant. Food in Tokyo is generally good, and walking into a random ramen or other restaurant was – at least in my case – always a pleasant experience.  The city clearly has an “eating out” culture, with more restaurants per block than anywhere else I’ve ever been.

Ginza

Ginza is the most western part of Tokyo I visited, and my hotel happened to be nearby, so I spent more time there than anywhere else.  This is where you get to pay 10 euros for a coffee and feel like that was cheap.

Everywhere there are megastores with brands that we all recognise, but aren’t used to seeing in such large and extravagant architecture.  Massive glass-walled showrooms announce brand names like Chanel, Dior, Emporio Armani, Omar Piguet, Rolex, Vanessa Bruno and so on.  There’s also a bit of a French fetish at work, with local chains of Dalloyau, Mariage Frères and Printemps, as well as the Belgian chocolatier Pierre Marcolini.  Basically, if it’s branded and expensive, you’ll find it here.

One thing you quickly notice about this area as well as all the others is that Tokyo is vertical.  A building will have a shop on the ground floor, and then signs indicating stores on the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh floors.  And those stores are no less impressive than the one with the glass facade – for example Abercrombie and Fitch are on the second and third floor above (as I recall) Dior.

The restaurants are often hidden away on the top floors of these pseudo-shopping-complexes, as this area is quite possibly the most expensive in Tokyo in terms of rents.  The joke that I was told was that if you take Japan’s highest-denomination bank note and fold it up as small as you’re physically able, then you drop the folded up banknote on the ground in Ginza, it’s value will not be sufficient to purchase the ground it landed on.

Shibuya

I unfortunately don’t have any photos of Shibuya, but there’s really not much that’s visually impressive in terms of architecture.  What you do see here is Japanese youth in all its crazy splendour.  This is the area where the teenagers and university students gather to preen in public and purchase more of the outlandish clothes they like to wear.

Actually, that’s a little unfair.  The girls dress in the most original way they can, each wearing clothes that look as though they were personalised by her just to ensure nobody else would be wearing quite the same thing.  Dresses with frills and layers with different patterns, tops with designs each more colourful, outlandish or three-dimensional than the last, headwear and hairstyles that probably take more time to put together than your average European spends grooming in a month.  The boys, on the other hand, fall into two clear categories.  Either they really don’t care what they wear and they’re in branded T-shirts and jeans, or they’ve got themselves a job and they’re all wearing near-identical suits, white or blue shirts and a tie.  All of the differentiation among this latter class of office-worker is in the hairstyle, which is clearly a matter of great importance to the Japanese.

Shibuya is one of those places where you wish there were more coffee-shops so you could just sit and people-watch for hours.

Shinjuku

Shinjuku is the area that contains Tokyo’s equivalent of Pigalle.  It’s the red-light district.  Of course there’s more to Shinjuku than the red light district.  If you leave the central area near the station and head west you get to some skyscrapers and expensive luxury hotels.

I got completely lost here.  Everything is extremely gaudy and disorienting, the shops are all either gaming parlours (the Japanese are clearly very into video games and gambling machines of various descriptions), bars, restaurants, nightclubs, private clubs, cabarets, hostess bars, love hotels and a wide variety of perplexing businesses that, I presume, offer services that border on prostitution while studiously avoiding crossing the legal boundary between “adult entertainment” and brothels.

The Japanese attitude to this sort of thing is something I have yet to figure out.  Europe is clearly extremely prudish in comparison to the overt nature of the adult industry in Tokyo.  The Love Hotel evolved out of the lack of personal space in the home, and provides an apparently socially acceptable place for a couple to go spend some intimate time together, the rooms are clearly rented by the hour.  I think the sex trade also uses them as a venue for their services to avoid anything “illegal” happening in the local clubs.  There is a wealth of information, including books studying, cataloging and even photographing the phenomenon (see link to the right).

Harajuku

Harajuku is where you go if you want to see the Japanese love of dressing up taken to an incredible extreme.  This is where young Japanese meet up on weekends dressed as their favourite anime characters, or their favourite rock band. The disguises they wear know no limits, with groups of friends wandering around in full-body teddybear outfits and others in extreme goth disguise that would put to shame any real goth hanging around a London suburb.

I’m not sharing the photos I took here because they’re of people, and I didn’t ask anyone’s permission to use them, but a google search will give you an idea of what it’s like.  Harajuku is now the name given to the hobby of dressing up in this DIY fashion, and has also been “borrowed” by Gwen Stefani for her new perfume.

Ueno

Switching from one extreme to another, I took the extremely efficient metro to Ueno on the Sunday to take a look around the old temples and the park in this district.  There’s more of this in Tokyo than just this district, but I didn’t have all the time in the world at this point.

Ueno station is much like any other, crowded and efficient, but when you enter the park, you enter a haven of quiet and serenity.  As you approach the temples and shrines themselves, you realise again that “a country of contrasts” doesn’t really do Japan justice.

I was sorry to see that the Toshogu Shrine was being renovated and was therefore not open to visitors, but you can still walk up the approach, see the bronze lanterns and the front gate.  The temple itself was hidden behind a canopy which was no doubt there to protect scaffolding from the elements.  It’s hard to begrudge a country with such wonderful landmarks the opportunity to maintain and renovate them, but their timing really sucked.

On the approach to the Shrine, I came across the prayers, wishes and thoughts of those who had passed before, in the form of inscribed wooden tablets hanging on a form of billboard.

Although some were very thoughtful, globalisation’s dark side was manifest in the occasional “Ted woz ere” prayer, but the concept of people leaving their wishes and prayers in this form is quite moving.

There were several shrines and temples, which meant that even though I didn’t get to see the Toshogu Shrine, I did get to see what these look like inside. I don’t know whether the Japanese are particularly religious.  My guidebook indicates that they’re remarkably tolerant of various belief systems and that the most religious people in the country are the Catholics.  Perhaps there’s a strong dose of superstition as there is in China, but I didn’t really see much evidence of that either.

There’s certainly a healthy respect for religion, with everyone studiously washing their hands before entering temples, even if they seemed to be tourists from another part of Japan.

Overall, I was very lucky to be able to spend a weekend in Tokyo – it’s much too far away for me to do that without free-riding on my company’s need to send me there for work.  I found the Japanese to be incredibly nice, with their general behaviour being much more considerate of others than what life in Paris leads you to expect.

More than anything though, what I love about visiting a place so different from where I live is that it opens your mind and knocks you out of the rut that the daily grind constantly threatens to trap you in.  It’s the same when I visit Africa, or the Middle East.  But Tokyo is special. Whereas in Africa or the Middle East there’s a constant effort necessary to adapt to local customs and expectations of your behaviour, I found that on the one hand I wanted to act in a way that let me blend in, it was an intellectual effort but not an unpleasant one, and on the other hand, when I got it wrong, the Japanese laughed, and explained things to me, because they’re really very tolerant, and the fact that you made the effort and you tried is what really counts.

Taking a lesson from Aikido, I’ve decided to go with the momentum, and pushed the flight all the way back to Sunday evening, giving me a full weekend in Tokyo.  Having only been once, and only for business, I have no idea what to do once I’m there, but a couple of queries sent out in strategic directions have yielded results and at least now, even if I am alone, I shall be alone in interesting places recommended to me by trusted sources.

What’s the point of letting your company bat you around the globe like a glorified polo ball and not take advantage of the fact that you’re going to be visiting somewhere you would have had to pay a fortune to get to on your own.

One weekend in Tokyo coming up.  I shall resist the urge to post all my pictures to Facebook to prove how cool I am. Now if this website had readers from Tokyo who have ideas about having a good time there without feeling like Bill Murray, their input would, at this point, be more than welcome. ]]> http://www.salocin.com/slingshot/?feed=rss2&p=129 0 http://www.salocin.com/slingshot/?p=125 http://www.salocin.com/slingshot/?p=125#comments Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:11:05 +0000 slung http://www.salocin.com/slingshot/?p=125 In order to get a lot out of life, you need to not waste your energy on things that enrich others, serve no useful purpose to you, and consume not only your cash, but also your hard-earned time to evaluate and consume.I get particularly offended by people who sell “complementary therapies” that have been subjected to clinical testing and have been proven to have no effect.  Especially when these therapies are recommended as alternatives to the traditional therapies that have proven benefits that have been rigorously (by which I mean accurately) tested and verified.

For example, acupuncture as a cure for AIDS.  If the very concept of such a thing doesn’t offend you, or if you think “yeah, why not?”, then this post is probably not for you.

The world is full of sharks and shysters who have somehow gotten it into their head that the easiest, quickest or most legitimate way to make a living for themselves is to take other people’s living away from them.  You see them everywhere, from the quick-handed magicians playing shell games at the entrance to the local flea market for €1 per game, to companies selling emotion-modulating electronic devices that guard against “negative energy waves” for €60 per gullible victim.

There’s no use ranting against them, no matter how offensive you may find them, because no amount of ranting is ever going to make them go away.  There are simply too many opportunities to make money this way for someone not to take the opportunity to do so.

It comes as little surprise when you see a headline like this one : Bracelets ‘Useless’ In Arthtitis [BBC News].  What does set me back slightly is the fact that people have been using copper bracelets as a cure for arthritis for hundreds of years.  We stopped thinking the earth was flat a fairly long time ago, but copper as an unexplainable cure for an ailment of the joints… sure.  Why Not?

Since there are no proven effects of any kind, and since magnets are not regulated as a medical treatment (since they aren’t one), your average shyster can claim anything he or she wants in order to get you to buy them.  This website : magneticarthritisrelief.com, claims that magnets alleviate almost any kind of problem.  Including Lupus, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and respiratory problems!!  How does it work you might ask?  Easy : by (and I quote) restoring cellular magnetic balance, and by improving circulation (because there’s iron in the blood).  Surely if that worked the magnet would stall circulation rather than the other way around?

Basically, any gobbledygook will sell the stuff to someone looking for a solution and convinced that medication will not work for them (probably because they were misdiagnosed).

There’s a good reason these things work, it’s called regression to the mean.  When you go out and look for an alternative therapy, you’re usually at a point where whatever ails you is worse than usual.  But the vast majority of health problems alleviate over time, so you go out and buy some crackpot therapeutic aid, your body gets better all on its own, and since you were using this pointless device at the time, you attribute the improvement to the device.  Or the homeopathic pills.  Or the foil cap you put on your head.  Or the weird fellow who placed his hands over your body and chanted “Omm” for 45 minutes before lightening your purse.

Lifehacking, and making the most of your time, is not about finding shortcuts to common problems, or finding the one solution to an obstacle that somehow nobody else ever thought of or found.  It’s about applying common sense to situations where, for reasons of social programming or lack of persepective, our behaviour has become inefficient and wasteful.

If you keep buying a better to-do list for your portable computer, you’ll spend all your time migrating to-do lists rather than getting stuff done.  After far too much trial and error, I now use paper and a pen.

In your search for more efficient ways to do things, don’t get sidetracked by the shiny marketing on the latest productivity application.  Look for testimonials in unbiased forums.  Look to understand exactly how this will help compared to how you do things today.  Much of the time, the improvements in productivity are less than the cost of learning the new system.  Most improvements in your efficiency and ability to do things require changes in your outlook rather than an investment in a productivity tool or a change in your belief system.

Maintain a healthy level of scepticism, or you may find your lifehacking habit benefiting other people more than it does you.

A lot of people who write about alternative lifestyles go on and on about travel and it’s various benefits, and while I don’t like bandwagons, the reason this is so often repeated is because it’s true.  Living your life in a way that is enriching, enlivening, stimulating (pick your adjective) is most likely linked to travel.  It’s worth talking about and without a doubt a subject I will be coming back to on a regular basis.

Travel clears the mind of the daily clutter and allows inspiration to occur.

You probably want to read that again.  To my mind it’s a very important phenomenon and it shouldn’t be glossed over or relegated to the ranks of banal platitudes.

What happens when you travel is that your context is changed, and the routines that you go rely on every day to get everything done are thrown out of the window.  Routine sucks the life out of living.  It’s a necessary evil to get through the grind of daily work, given the huge number of things the average job requires us to remember in any given day, but ultimately, it’s a shroud that covers all the bright things in your life as it necessarily draws your focus onto the same things you saw yesterday, and the day before.

Travel breaks routine, and when I travel, as I look out of the aircraft window, or the countryside as it flies past the TGV, a strange phenomenon occurs.  My creativity seems to awaken.  I feel inspired by the smallest and simplest things.

It’s strange that just moving around should do this, because at work I live under an onslaught of stimuli that don’t result in creative output. I’m too busy getting stuff done.  I’ve got responsibilities, I’ve got deadlines, I’ve got hierarchy looking over my shoulder and wondering if the project’s going to get finished on time.  I haven’t got time to wonder whether the solution to this or that problem would make an interesting business plan.

In fact, these days, my creativity awakens in advance of travel.  For example, a couple of days ago I had an idea for a website/utility that might be useful to a few people, and guess what – it went live today, before I’ve even set foot on the plane.  (If you’re curious, you can check it over here).  I’ve managed to produce this despite running a fever and sitting in my apartment feeling pathetically sorry for myself while drugged up on decongestants.

I’m a long way from those who suggest that the only way to break free of the chains of your job is to quit and travel for a year, but that’s because it doesn’t take a year.  It takes a long weekend, and we all have those, regardless of the jobs we happen to be in.

You’re not actually chained to your job.  You’re chained to the routine that the job requires you to follow so that you can perform as an effective cog in the machine that is your business.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s terribly dull if it’s all that defines you. Clearly it is not all that defines you – very few people live to work, even if that’s what it seems like (especially during autumn as the days get longer).

Taking short breaks away from your city and your work provides you with the change of context necessary to remember that the work doesn’t define you, that your creativity, your intelligence and your ability to be a part of something is at your service outside work as much as inside it.

That’s the sort of laudable sentiment you have at 7 in the evening after a couple of glasses of wine, when your life-goal-setting exercise involves nothing more than ink and paper.

One of the key things we deal with on a day-to-day basis when we try to make changes to our lifestyles is that the person we are in the morning isn’t the same person who went to bed last night.  

In fact, the person who makes all the resolutions to get fitter, take more risks, travel more, etc, is not at all the same person who’s actually going to go running, stick his neck out or get up at the crack of dawn to catch a flight to a malaria-infested swamp.  We’re in such a different frame of mind when it comes to executing on our commitments that we’re a fundamentally different person.  I sometimes feel quite resentful in the morning of the person who thought it would be a good idea to get up so early.  I’m equally resentful when summer rolls around of the lazy idiot who decided it would be a good idea to spend winter eating good food, drinking good wine, and not lifting a finger (or a weight).

Even if, as we silence the alarm on the bedside table, we remember the reasons why we decided to get up, these reasons can be a lot less convincing when you have to sacrifice two hours of sleep to make just one step on the path towards your goals.

The “good you”, who establishes the goals and the training plan, knows this when (s)he makes the plans in the first place, and you therefore ought to compensate for the presumed lack of motivation the “morning you” will have when the alarm goes off.

My method – possibly a little expensive for some (certainly feels expensive to me) is to get a personal trainer.  Personal trainers serve two purposes.  First and foremost they get you up in the morning.  Second they push you a little harder than you would push yourself.

So on Mondays or Tuesdays, depending on the week, the alarm goes off at 6am and I leap out of bed.  Not because I’m looking forward to an hour’s worth of physical effort, but because I have no choice.  It’s all pre-paid anyway, the trainer will be there at 6.50, and I need to eat, drink a cup of coffee, and shave before he arrives (I don’t have time to shave afterwards and still get to work on time).

Finding strategies to manage the lazy version of myself who has to deal with the day-to-day implementation of the ideas I have when I’m occasionally energetic is key to being able to implement any sort of real change.

This morning’s run was good.  We did Fartlek training, pushing the heart rate high and then letting it recover over and over.  But with the arrival of winter, the thought of training is becoming less and less appealing, and perhaps indoor alternatives will need to be considered if I’m to continue with the health kick during the colder months.

The wind changes direction gradually, and when finally it moves across your bow, you need to tack.  But a boat does not tack subtly.  All sails must change side, all crew members must be involved, and even the best boat will need to move a full sixty degrees through the wind.  To keep going towards the same destination, a subtle course correction will not do.

So it is with life.

For most of us, our environment (the wind) changes very slowly during our careers and our lives.  Or perhaps the we change what we want out of life and the boats we’ve built are no longer set up to take us where we want to go.  Sooner or later comes the realisation that we need to make a course correction, and that this will involve changing the way our sails are set in order to better harness the forces in our environment.  By the time we figure this out, we have been sailing our boats for many years, making changes to the way we act and the forces that drive us is an intimidating prospect.

When the wind changes, you either turn with the wind and let it push you around, or you change the set of the sails so that you can go where you want by harnessing it differently.

When this need or opportunity arises, we put it off, out of a fear of the cost and the difficulty and the effort required.  In order to keep wind in our sails, we change course.  We stay the same and we let our environment choose the direction we’re heading in.  We let our circumstances push us around.  We accept a course that no longer leads us to the destination we had originally envisaged.  In effect, we direct our lives towards a compromise.  We let the wind push us rather than undertake the changes necessary to harness its new direction.

If we could adapt, then the change in the environment could be helpful instead of harmful.

The pressure of knowing we’re heading in the wrong direction is an irritant; a slow poison.  With every passing moment we are deviating further and further from the course we intended.  Getting closer and closer to an unfriendly shore.

On a large boat, a tack is not a small manoeuvre.  It involves changing the entire disposition of the sails, changing the pitch of the hull, swinging the boom across the center of the boat, working winches and turning the wheel. A poorly executed tack means you lose all forward momentum. At worse you can end up stalled, with your head into the wind, unable to maneuver your boat (known as being in irons). Properly executed, it’s a clean and beautiful exercise that improves your speed and/or your heading.

So if, in your life, you’ve rarely or never changed direction, why would you take the risk?  After all, it’s much easier to rationalize our new direction and claim that we chose it.  That it suits us.  That it’s what we want.

It is not enough to travel.  It is not enough to be good at your job.  It is not enough to be well regarded or respected, qualified, experienced or competent.  It is only enough to be happy.  It is only enough to be personally satisfied.  And to be personally satisfied, you have to be honest about what you want, and do away with the social influence that tells you what is an acceptable goal. When the direction doesn’t suit you, you need to change direction. To tack. Regardless of the fact that every boat in the race is still on the same heading. You need to acknowledge that either you are heading to a different destination, or that you have your own opinion of how best to get to the same place everyone else wants to go.

Your personal happiness project.  Your own path to clear waters and a white sandy beach, requires you to take a long hard look at where you are and which way you’re heading, and decide how to get to where you want. Then make the changes, however difficult, risky or intimidating, that are necessary to bring you there.

Lots of people out there will tell you to scuttle your ship and assume you’ll be better off swimming.  This is not true. Some people make it with these radical, sacrificial decisions, but they are the minority.  You are better off accepting the ship you are in, building on what you have, and using its strengths to find a new path.

Doing away with the metaphor for a moment : don’t quit your job, don’t arbitrarily throw away what makes you who you are today, and what puts bread on the table.  Don’t assume that life as a professional hobo will make you happier.  (That’s not tacking, that’s jumping overboard.) It’s unlikely to be true.  If you must change the way you make your living, then find the ways you can gradually make your income – your salary, your benefits, your bonus, your job security – redundant.  Replace them with something else, do it in your spare time, and when you have another boat to sail, then you can stop depending on the boat you’re on.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to tighten the mainsheet and prepare the jib in anticipation of my own course correction.  You might want to hold onto something.

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.

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…

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.

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.