Glamorous Business Travel
October 16th, 2005
So, about this time last week I was getting ready for the wonderful opportunity that is Travelling on Business. Having fun, drinking beer on the Company’s round, seeing the world… Oh, could I have been more misguided?
Obviously, I was wrong.
Nothing to do with the Company, though… but to do with some (possibly retarded) baggage handlers at Bristol “International” Airport. Basically, we were flying from a tiny speck of an airport (Bristol) to another insignificant regional airport (Bremen) and had to get a connecting flight through Amsterdam, or travel at 3am.
But there were “administrative errors with the paperwork”, or some other bollocks excuse (maybe that a large ‘X’, accepted as a signature across the West Country, isn’t good enough for international air travel) that meant we were delayed taking off for an hour and missed our connection. We were flying in a tiny little Fokker 70, I might add. Its true what Neal Stephenson says in Cryptonomicon (a book which everyone should own, read and re-read) about not dicking about with anything smaller than a 747…
So, we missed our connection and had the choice of a 4-hour drive to Bremen, getting there just after midnight, or staying in Amsterdam and getting on a plane at 6am to Hamburg and driving 2 hours from there. For some reason that I don’t remember, we stayed in Amsterdam.
The next morning, having got up at 4:30am local time (thats 3:30am UK time…) with just 3 hours of sleep, we were driving from Hamburg to Bremen. However, Bremen was having some sort of annual fair and the roads were a complete nightmare, so the 2-hour drive became a 3-hour drive. But at least I managed a nap in the back of the car…
I don’t blame the carrier for this, they helped as much as they could, but the damage had been done.
The moral of the story: always, always, always fly direct!