Barely had a spare second to scratch myself – let alone write blog entries – this week. Tomorrow morning’s departure to Adelaide is presently very much on my mind, and my primary interest is not sleeping through my 05:00 alarm in order to be able to take off from Heathrow at 09:20 (yeah… 4+ hour lead time – don’t those wacky airlines just make it more fun than you can possibly stand?!).
So there’s no chance of hearing in detail about our Friday night festive awesomeness at The Gunmakers (including Jeffrey & I sampling the HIGHLY excellent Ten 20 Commemorative Ale as supplied by Mr P D Baggoley), nor the unexpected bus stop meeting of the mystery beer-carrying girl with the taxidermy duck in one hand. There also won’t be time to wax enthusiastic about Sue & Ben’s magnificent Christmas Stomach Distension (by effect of Turkey & Aubergine) Event, nor the journey down to Deepest Morden for Gypsy Jazz – whereupon we couldn’t fit our merry motley crew into the pub, and so sought out alternate premises and stumbled on the cosy environs of The Sultan. And then naturally there’s only time for the barest mention of an epic and masterful roast lunch (with beery accompaniments) at The Old White Lion in the company of Mr D Haste, Ms B Knott, and Mr P Dearing. I scarcely dare finish with a light brushing over the topic of the magnificent Lamb Shank Extravaganza at Neonwombat & HC’s Maida Vale Palace.
Makes sense why I haven’t bloody packed yet, eh?
But of particularly joyful interest is the wonder of modern technology that is online checkin. Following a recent temporally unrewarding experience in New York (more on this at some point), I’m now a bit obsessed with the idea of checking in to my flight online, however this particular airline – despite bold claims that online checkin opens 24 hours before departure time – seems to be non-cooperative.
Phoning their Customer Service Team (presumably in Abu Dhabi they mean this in a similarly agricultural context as we do here in Britain) I was told that “checkin for this flight opens 20 hours before departure”, or to put it another way, “Fuck off out of my face – I knock off in 3 hours, so ring back when some other poor schmuck has to deal with it”.
Tenaciously as you’d expect, I phoned them back a few hours later to see if any progress had been made – they said “We’ve had some problems and our website is down”, (although clearly it isn’t, because it’s displaying erroneous error messages – that’s not “down”, that’s just “useless*”), “Please try again after 6:30pm: the web team will fix it by then”. Cynically, my cruft-translator understood that as “Please don’t phone until everyone else on this flight gets home and starts calling us, meaning that there’s no chance you’ll get a line through to us until at least 8:30pm, which is a shame as we close at 8pm”.
Oooooh boy, if I get bumped from this flight I will not be an amused tent inhabitant.
* This is technical web jargon, yes.