Tuesday 22nd of December, 2009
Mmm. Difficult choice...
Up at 6:00. By 6:30 it transpires that our flight has been cancelled. Try to get to speak to KLM, firstly at their 24hr number, then at their UK office, with no joy. At 8:30 decide to go to the airport anyway. So do so.
Get there at 9:30, go to Terminal 4. It's not entirely clear what to do - queue in the wrong queue for a bit, then move to the right queue, which is astonishingly long. The end of the queue is difficult to find. An operative works his way down the queue from the back, which means that people who arrive after us get dealt with first. Eventually get dealt with - i.e. a woman takes Haru's mobile number and the flight number and gives us two coupons (without actually clarifying what the coupons are for). We go and have breakfast at Cafe Rouge. I don't use the coupons to pay for breakfast, as the waiting staff are having enough difficulty doing their basic job. I ask one of the people with clipboards when we need to stay in the airport until, and he says both that we can go home, and that there's a meeting at 14:00, so we wait until 14:00. No actual meeting transpires, so we go home. As the train is about to get into Paddington, H gets a call offering us the choice of flying tomorrow or flying to Amsterdam today and hanging around the airport departure lounge until tomorrow afternoon. Mmm. Difficult choice...
Every element of the day so far has been governed not so much by incompetence but by vagueness and inclarity, as well as an absence of any overview or strategic vision. Education that, in a way.
Go home. Have tea. I go out and walk up to Watkins, get some supplies that I wish I'd got before and walk home, then get a lift to the store with some boxes (that I also wished I'd done before), and then use the newly-created space to tidy up a bit, another thing I wish I'd managed to do.
So not so much a flight cancellation as a second chance to depart cleanly.
Have dinner and watch TV - Oliver Postgate, Clement Freud, some alleged comedy show, Screenwipe and then some Michael Jackson programming. Soon to bed. Let's see what happens tomorrow.
