As a followup to my previous entry, "The Airport Experiences", I guess you folks should be wondering if my trip home was any better... Well, this being my first trip to Europe, they figured they'd better make it as strange as possible for me :)
I never did get my luggage in Glasgow, although KLM claims that your computer tagged it as heading from Amsterdam to Glasgow... only it was never tagged in Glasgow upon arrival. So I was wearing the same pair of pants for 9 days... did anyone notice that I smelled?
When I tried to leave on the morning of Saturday, the 7th, I ran into new wrinkles. My plane was supposed to leave at 5:55 AM, so I was there early, checked in, ready to go. Sweet, we board the plane on time, and sit there on the tarmac for a while. This is a familiar place for me to be sitting, on a full to capacity plane at the Glasgow airport, but not moving.
They inform us that we have had some technical problem with the cabin pressurization, and that it'd be a few minutes before we could leave. Half an hour later, we're loaded off the plane and back to the terminal while they repair the plane, or presumably grab a replacement. An hour later, the flight is cancelled. Shit. I will now miss all of my connections, and miss coffee with Wade in Minneapolis on one of my layovers.
Well, okay there's another wrinkle. If you bought anything at duty free after you went through security, you cannot take liquids through security on the second pass. People are upset, which is a fairly typical response to the security measures as a rule.
Neither KLM or Northwest actually have a presence in the airport, and deal though a proxy called Servissair or somesuch. Servissair is totally incompetent, and a full 8 days after the car fire, do not have their computer booking systems up and running yet. I mean, how hard can it be to reinstall those systems anyway?!
We wait for hours and hours - all other flights to Amsterdam are full. We wait. At 11 AM, they put us on a bus to Edinburgh to grab the last Amsterdam flight that evening. We wait and wait some more. Everyone sleeps on the bus, so I can't even say if the countryside was pleasant. At about 1PM we are at Edinburgh at the Servissair desk there. Well, at least their booking system works, but by now everyone is upset about being late and demands refunds and they fly out using different airlines that depart earlier.
The flight leaving Edinburgh is delayed. We eventually board and get out of there, but since we're late, everyone misses their transfers again. The KLM desk in Amsterdam has a lot of angry flyers...
KLM rebooks me to a flight the next afternoon, and puts me up in a fairly nice 4-star hotel in Amsterdam. They had a really nice building stone for their countertops, an anorthosite featuring labradorite plagioclase with a beautiful schiller effect... I'll make my countertops out of that when I have the money :)
Finally, we leave Amsterdam at 3PM the following day. I am 27 hours behind schedule, and will not be able to meet Wade. Pfft.
As we approach Minneapolis, we start circling the airport since it's been closed from a bad thunderstorm. After a few circuits, we touch down. Finally back on the ground on the right side of the pond, yay!
Oh, wait - my flight to Winnipeg is delayed. I collect call my girlfriend to let her know as she was going to meet me at the airport at home. Our flight gets delayed on the tarmac again as we're missing the co-pilot... half an hour later, I'm finally in the air for the short hop to Winnipeg. My cuter half is waiting for me just outside of customs (which are orders of magnitude friendlier than their American counterparts). Time to go home and relax. Whee!
An Anecdote:
While on the plane I was in discussion with an American businessman who was in Europe to drum up some business. He worked for a private enterprise, and so they didn't have to answer to shareholders all the time, and as a result, they've had an easier time doing the ethical thing with regards to energy and the environment, even if it cost a little more. This included things like buying up paper recycling plants, and then expanding their business. A nice guy who was generally interested in how open source worked.
One of the things he said stuck with me however, when comparing the difference between the Americans and much of the rest of the world. He said: "Americans love their country, but don't give a damn about their countrymen, whereas other countries do the reverse."
I got to thinking about how this related to the structure of KDE and realized that every KDE contributor will say the same thing when asked what keeps them contributing: "well, the community is amazing."
If KDE were a nation, we'd be a nation that loves our countrymen :) Perhaps that philosophy explains why we are doing well in those markets that are outside of the US :P
Cheers.
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