I posted yesterday about the start of my trip to OpenWorld. I arrived late, so I never got around to posting about the second half of my trip so here goes…
Frankfurt to San Francisco
I was in a pretty bad mood when it came to boarding. We were 4+ hours late and the boarding process was a complete disaster. Nobody could hear the announcements, so we were all in queues to ask what the hell was going on. Even so, nobody on the desk thought to just come and shout out what to do. As a result, boarding was like a rugby scrum, with people from all classes, seating zones and people who had not cleared security all thrown together. I don’t remember ever taking so long to board. Sigh.
I got on the plane and was instantly more miserable. It was one of those planes where you all have to watch the same films on shared screens. Sigh. I watched:
- The Back-up Plan: Nauseating romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez.
- Iron Man 2: In my opinion it wasn’t as good as Iron Man 1, but it was still pretty cool.
- Just Wright: Chick-Flick. Would have hated it, except I had used up all my hate on the Jennifer Lopez film.
The food came along and guess what? I wasn’t on the list of vegetarians. Sigh. Luckily, they had extra so it wasn’t a big deal, just another thing to “brighten” my day.
I was seated next to the galley so I got to hear a lot of the gossip from the cabin crew. They do talk rather loud. 🙂 One woman seemed to be hitting the assistance button continually, which was getting on their nerves (and mine because I could hear the dinging). It seems the maintenance crew had left one of the internal panels off, which was mentioned by a passenger 2 hours before landing. HELLO! Don’t you think you might want to mention that to someone before you take off ? You are sitting next to a ruddy great hole on an 11+ hour flight! The cabin attendant told the woman to keep her seat belt on. 🙂 I’m sure it was just a cosmetic thing.
All in all, the flight was ok. The cabin crew were pretty good, which offset most of my gripes.
In the update to yesterdays post I mentioned Hajo Normann and Andrejus Baranovskis were on an later flight from Frankfurt. I think it was scheduled to leave about 3 hours after mine. Their flight wasn’t delayed, so they actually left over an hour before me. When I landed at SFO I saw Hajo in the customs queue. It turns out they were in a holding pattern for over an hour so we landed at about the same time. 🙂
It has been mentioned several times by friends and family that I never seem to have a straight forward trip anywhere. My response is, this is the reality of international travel. There is no enjoyment involved. It’s a matter of endurance and anger management. Can someone hurry up and invent a teleport system already!
Cheers
Tim…
