Quote:
| Originally Posted by swannymere It's not quite as funny 1 year on  |
Depends on how much time you've spent on the internet
I feel for the guy though. The very worst flight I have ever taken in my life was a trip on Virgin from New Dehli to Heathrow.
The check-in computer wasn't working so there was a massive scrum to get checked in, then when I'd fought my way to check in I found I had to get a special ticket (like the ones you get at deli counters - no pun intended) before you'd earned the right to check in. No amount of persuasion would work, so I was pointed in the direction of a rostrum type desk in the middle of the terminal floor, staffed by a single person who was giving out the deli tickets for the check-in for ALL the check-in desks. Needless to say, this wasn't a scrum it was a seething mass of humanity that I had to fight through with a laptop and suitcase. Finally got my check-in counter pass about an hour after the scheduled flight time - but not to worry, the scrum around the Virgin check-in desk was still there...only bigger.
Pushed my way into the melee again and finally reached the check in desk about an hour later...not to worry, there were still people waiting to check in behind me and the plane was still on the tarmac - now about 2.5 hours behind schedule. Finally got rid of the suitcase, which although I always travel light, still contained two weeks supply of shirts and pants and weighed in at 12 kilos that had begun to feel more like 12 stone by this time.
Then into the queue for security. Indian beaurocracy is weird, there are endless things that have to happen that aren't considered necessary anywhere else in the world. You have to sign a form to take your handbaggage on, then you're given an official luggage tag. As you go down the corridors to security, you pass people sitting on chairs at the side of the corridor, at first you just march past them...then they call you back. You have to get a coloured dot from them, which they stick on your luggage tag and another one on your boarding pass. I don't know why, they don't do any checking, they just stick the dots on...presumably it's just to tell everyone further down the line that you've walked past them rather than teleporting to security.
Finally pitched up at security with my growing collection of coloured dots, then found I had to go through immigration first, so into another queue where I did my usual trick of choosing the shortest line, then finding that my line was being served my Mr Pedant who was subjecting everone to a 5 minute exit interview rather than a quick check of the visa and a rubber stamp.
Then I got to security, where women and men join the same scrum, but then women get singled out for separate security checks through their own channel so there's a bottleneck as a sort of traffic policeman holds up all the blokes and waves women through.
Finally, finally, finally I got through security and through the scanners...every single person is bodysearched as well...then, horror of horrors, the security folks found that I had got a long forgotten and broken disposable lighter in one of the hundreds of little pockets in my laptop rucksack. The lighter had no flint in it, so wouldn't even make a spark, and it was completely empty because it was cracked so all the fluid was long gone. But I had to join a quue of other miscreants to have an interview with security then sign a form saying that I was very, very, very, very sorry and I wouldn't do it again.
Finally, all the passengers made it through to the departure lounge and boarding, or rather the stampede to get on the plane started. When I reached my given seat I found a whole family had occupied the whole area around where I was sitting and had claimed my seat as well. There didn't seem to be any one of them that spoke more than a few words of English and trying to convey the concept that you have to sit where your boarding pass tells you seemed completely alien.
It was chaos. Kids were running up and down the aisle, people would get up out of their seat and go and talk to family and friends further down the plane and of course...amongst the manual check in chaos, they found there were more people on the plane than they'd checked in. The cabin crew tried doing a head count, but people kept moving as they did so and it was impossible to reach the same number twice. The stewardesses appealed for everybody to sit down in their nominated seats over the tannoy in English and Hindi, then when that failed, the purser gave it a go...finally the captain walked through each section of the cabin and screamed at the top of his voice "If you don't sit down right now and let us do a headcount I'm ordering everyone off the plane and we're not going anywhere" this was translated into a couple of local languages and the chaos turned into just a bit of restlessness with just a couple of people popping up to get something out of the overhead locker.
Finally, after a further threat from the captain that, "the next person that stands up, or moves anywhere get's thrown off the flight", they managed to check that everyone with a boarding pass was accounted for, and, apart from swapping a few people around whose boarding pass bore no resemblance to where they were supposed to be sitting..that was it, we just had to wait another 15 minutes for a take-off slot and we pushed back and were off. The plane was 6 hours late, with 2 of those hours taken up with the comedy seating arangements after boarding....
All of this was in 40 degree heat....
Finally, we were airborne, and I must've had the same 'food' and entertainment system as the guy above, but honestly...I couldn't have cared less by that time...my nerves were completely fried