I and my colleague Simon arrived at JFK at about 6pm for an 8pm flight, but alas there were no seats left next to each other, so I ended up in 9D, & Simon in 10B. We make our way to the lounge & having collected our obligatory complementary drink vouchers (because the concept of an open bar is just a little too far beyond the sort of service that one might expect for a £3500+ ticket) we decide to pop into the loos to change out of our suits. In theory this is a simple concept. In practice the amount of space occupied by a big jacket, a suit bag which needs to be opened and accessed, a laptop, two pairs of shoes, the contents of my pockets, two sets of clothes, a toilet without a lid and a person struggling to juggle all this while not dipping the sleeve of their jacket in the dunny was almost greater than that afforded by the cubicle, but to make a long story short, and without going into the details of which coathanger was used when, how the suitbag was hung on the coathook (with a certain amount of concern as to the design ratings of the said coathook) on the door, how a shoe fell out of my bag & almost rolled out of the cubicle, and other trivialities whose significance was amplified in inverse proportion to the amount of floor space available at the time suffice to say that we emerged clothed in jeans & a t-shirt. I wander out of the loo area and meet Simon who has just completed a similar process, and we commence the search for a seat. During the circumnavigation of the lounge, Simon casually says "Did you happen to notice the change rooms in there?" He'd spotted it on the way out.
We settled down to the wait of just under two hours before our plane left, when an announcement came over the speaker system. The staff of AA felt that they would like to share with us, and in that moment of touchy-feeling love and well-being, and in an open and caring manner, they shared that due to component failures, our flight would be two hours late. So, we'd be delayed leaving, on a plane which was progressively falling to bits, and we were going to be put in a stack over Heathrow when we got there because we missed our slot. Great.
But not all things were bad - Simon happened to have the classic Apple 2 trading game Taipan on his Palm pilot, and we wiled away the hours discussing opium prices, the best ports to buy it in, and the wisdom of holding such discussions in a US airport, and the meaning of the word 'soft' as applied to the departure time of a flight to Bermuda (the couple opposite us had a more than academic interest in the dialect of English spoken by AA staff, and after some research involving cross-cultural interaction with a native speaker of the dialect determined that it meant they didn't have a clue when it was leaving.) It was at about this point when the limits of the care&sharing fest was revealed when they announced that the 9:15 flight to London was boarding. Unfortunately they forgot to mention it to us that there might be a later flight we could catch which would leave earlier. This was made even worse when they shared with us that our plane had just arrived at the airport - thus the component failure must have been when the plane was leaving London, and they must have known it was late when we were checking in. We did eventually get to the flight, after a long wait to board with one person checked boarding passes with 4 people talking to each other behind the desk at the gate. When we got to the front of the line they did have two people on the boarding passes, but by then they had 6 people behind the desk.
I got to my seat to find someone in it, wanting to swap so that they could sit next to a travelling companion, which left me with a free seat next to me. So having two lots of two seats, American Airlines had managed to split two lots of two people up. Strange. In the end I swapped seats again so that a Japanese couple who were split up could sit together. The confusion only got worse when as we almost reached the top of the runway, the pilot announced that a de-icer wasn't working so rather than apologising he would put safety first & return to the gate (so maybe they didn't fix that component failure). As soon as we moved out of the queue of planes, the pilot announced that they had convinced themselves that the de-icer was working again, so we went & joined the end of the queue again. I suppose it could have been worse-but we did finally get into the air 3 1/2 hours late.
The stack over Heathrow was only 15 minutes, which gave us a chance to have a look at London and the Millenium blancmange (as Charlie described the Dome) and the London Eye observation wheel (the difference between a ferris wheel and an observation wheel seems to be that a ferris wheel goes round and round and you ride on it, whilst an observation wheel stays still and you observe it, and make observations about it - such as 'What a joke/waste of money/embarrassment/etc' with expletives inserted as appropriate).
We made it down, and Heathrow didn't pose more than the usual obstacles (such as stationary moving walkways surrounded by barriers to block corridors), and it was good to be home.
Isn't travel fun. Not that I'm complaining of course - I wouldn't want
to swap it.
© Jonathan Main 2000