Well, I made it back to the US, but not without some last minute “twists” to my ”adventure”.
Getting up at 4:30am yesterday turned out to be a “piece of cake” — after that it got interesting.
Arrived at the terminal at 5:45am for a 7:40am flight, found my way to the British Airways check-in counter in the basement only to learn that their computer system was “down” — so, in typical European fashion, how did the six BA employees working there decide to handle the situation — they took a coffee break — when they talk about Europeans being “laid-back”, they’re not kidding!
At 6:45, someone apparently decided the system wasn’t coming back-up so they started manually checking people-in — that meant communicating by telephone with someone somewhere who had a working computer — relaying each passenger’s information to this mysterious person — picture three agents sharing one telephone with the other three standing behind “supervising”. Upon receiving approval for a passenger, the agent would hand the phone to the next agent, write out by hand a boarding pass, hand-tag the passenger’s luggage and place it on a carousel — then get back in line to use the telephone. If it hadn’t been forty-five minutes until my flight left, and my still needing to clear “Security”, it might have been humorous — reminded me of a Three Stooges comedy routine — and I kept thinking “This can’t be the first time the computers went down — is how it goes each time?”
Next “challenge” -- once I had a boarding pass I needed to leave the check-in area and pass thru a turnstile — unfortunately, to pass through the turnstile, you needed a bar-coded ticket (not a hand-written one) and the turnstile was unmanned. They ended-up directing us up to the main terminal Security area — of course the Security screeners had no idea what to do with passengers showing-up with hand-written boarding passes — again if it hadn’t been a time crunch, it would have been funny — the screener took each person’s boarding pass, walked over to, apparently, a supervisor, asked what to do, returned and waived that passenger through to the scanning machine, took the next passenger’s hand-written pass, walked over to the “supervisor”, asked what to do …. — you get the picture. We all made it on board and the flight took-off about forty minutes late — fortunately, it was only about one-quarter full. Being half-awake was probably what got us through this with no one “losing it”.
The flight itself was fine. Transferring at Heathrow was pretty-much uneventful except in the boarding area where an older woman asked me to watch her carry-ons while she went up to the check-in counter — halfway there, she tripped and did a face plant on the marble floor. Of course, they wanted her to go to their infirmary and get checked-out -- after talking with them for ten minutes, during which time another agent began boarding passengers, she refused, hobbled back, reclaimed her carry-ons and stumbled onto the plane. The pre-flight entertainment was so much better than the crummy movies they offered on the plane!
Long flight — departed Paris at 7:40 — landed in San Francisco fourteen house later. Arrived a few hours later at the house here only to find my car had a flat tire and wouldn’t start — not a huge deal, except -- I also found myself locked out of the house without a key (another story but not my fault) — and the sun was setting and the moon rising. Fortunately, I had left a back-up key with a friend who showed-up a couple of hours later to let me in. By then, I was ready for the day to be over.
Amazing the things you hallucinate about when you’re totally exhausted — like thinking that with all of the hassles on this return segment of my “adventure", it was Europe punishing me for leaving — or like hearing the news story that Trump was on his way to being elected President — when I heard that, I knew I was “losing it” and desperately needed to get some sleep!
