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Clearly it's not good to combine this frame of mind with going through passport control, but that's an unhappy conjunction that I can't avoid.
Showing posts with label a thousand tiny annoyances. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a thousand tiny annoyances. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Border Controls
One consequence of sleep deprivation is that I become increasingly ill-tempered, beyond the point where I subvocalise curses at the nth Singaporean who's incapable of walking in a straight line, and approaching the moment in my life where I punch somebody out for something trivial like breathing too noisily.
Clearly it's not good to combine this frame of mind with going through passport control, but that's an unhappy conjunction that I can't avoid.
Clearly it's not good to combine this frame of mind with going through passport control, but that's an unhappy conjunction that I can't avoid.
For those of you at the back of the plane
These are some of the things I was reminded of this weekend. There's a difference between how friendly people are in New York and Canada, and there's differences between being at the back of the plane and the middle.
Having missed our connection because United couldn't fly into Newark because of a bit of weather, we were hoping for a decent dose of compensation when we did arrive in New York.
Not so.
Having missed our connection because United couldn't fly into Newark because of a bit of weather, we were hoping for a decent dose of compensation when we did arrive in New York.
Not so.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Stuck in transit
We drank high-class booze and ate truffle-infused deep fried balls of macaroni and cheese until 1 in the morning, then went back to the flat, picked up our luggage and headed to the airport.
Our flight didn't depart until 7, so arriving at the airport at 3 seemed a bit premature. Changi is a strange, almost unearthly place that early in the morning; you can look up to the enormous ceiling of the check-in hall, and see birds flitting between the rafters.
Or you can look at the check in desks, where a huddle of coral-jacketed airport staff had a last minute pep talk.
They kept going into these huddles, and then not doing much. United's reservation systems were completely borked for about three hours this morning; you couldn't be checked in, the website was utterly down, and it looked like somebody was going to start writing out boarding tickets by hand. We were told that if we'd checked in online already, they could issue us tickets. Well, perhaps they could have done, if my online check-in yesterday hadn't resulted in that self-contradicting THIS IS NOT A BOARDING PASS boarding pass.
Our flight didn't depart until 7, so arriving at the airport at 3 seemed a bit premature. Changi is a strange, almost unearthly place that early in the morning; you can look up to the enormous ceiling of the check-in hall, and see birds flitting between the rafters.
Or you can look at the check in desks, where a huddle of coral-jacketed airport staff had a last minute pep talk.
They kept going into these huddles, and then not doing much. United's reservation systems were completely borked for about three hours this morning; you couldn't be checked in, the website was utterly down, and it looked like somebody was going to start writing out boarding tickets by hand. We were told that if we'd checked in online already, they could issue us tickets. Well, perhaps they could have done, if my online check-in yesterday hadn't resulted in that self-contradicting THIS IS NOT A BOARDING PASS boarding pass.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Down about getting dressed up
Dread news came today while I was in a meeting: the details of the company off-site in Bangkok next week.
