After a month of silence...
... I come back with a story that will rob me of all respect I ever might have had from you guys out there (yes, I am not assuming you had some to start with...). Nevertheless, this is what I did today:
I was booked on a flight from London to Zurich at 19:50PM tonight. The idea was to spend the weekend back home to celebrate my best friend's 30th birthday in style. I sort of might have screwed that up, I'm afraid. I had it all planned out so well: leave the office at 5pm on the dot to make sure not to get caught up in bank holiday traffic on the tube/train to Heathrow etc. Double and triple checked on the internet that there were no tube delay yadda yadda yadda. Drove everyone crazy with being so paranoid about London's transport system. Hell, I even intended to check in online - until I found out that I couldn't do that because the UK airports don't support the online check-in system from Swiss. So I even more wanted to be there on time to make sure they didn't give my seat away to some other lucky traveller (all known to happen to lots of people, I sort of started to believe it could happen to me, too). All went according to plan and I got to LHR by 18:05PM, way earlier than I ever usually make it to an airport for a flight. And then it happened:
I FOUND OUT I WAS AT THE BLOODY WRONG AIRPORT!!!
I was so utterly shocked by my own stupidity that all I could do was laugh. There was no way I would ever make it back across the whole city to make it in time to London City Airport. Trying to get anywhere in London at that time of the day within a reasonable timeframe is impossible.
So I decided to go to the Swiss desk to find out if they would be nice enough to let me go on one of the planes from LHR instead. Me, always the optimist *rolls eyes*. Turns out that lots of people missed their flight to Zurich at 18:00 due to the Piccadilly line being horribly delayed. So all of them were furious - and queuing in front of me. Demanding to get on the next plane. No surprise there that I didn't get on that one, as it was hopelessly overbooked. You can probably imagine the looks I got from the guy behind the counter when it was finally my turn and I had to confess my terribly embarrassing story!
Bottom line: All flights to Zurich are completely sold out until Monday. So he put me on 'standby' for the 2 only flights from LCY tomorrow morning. I refused to be put on standby for the LHR ones, too. Because it takes me more than 2 hours from where I live to there - compared to 10mins on the bus to LCY. The good thing about it all is that he was so annoyed with all the other customers complaining etc that he said I will not have to pay for the change of flight - if I get on it, that is. Normally, my tickets can't be changed to other flights, so that's a bonus. But I think he probably only did it because he knows from experience that there is no way I am going to make it on either one of the flight.
Anyway, I am determined to show up at LCY at 7.20AM tomorrow morning - and hopefully me hanging around there probably losing my mind from boredom will result in me getting on one of the flights. *fingers crossed for the idiot of the month*
Gosh, I cannot even put in words how utterly totally completely idiotic I feel right now.
If I don't make the flights, I will have to eat both boxes of Leonidas chocolates to console my frustration. And - more importantly - I have to come up with a plan re. what to do for the long weekend! Maybe I'll just sit around and try to figure out what on earth went wrong in my mind when I went to LHR instead of LCY. The more I think about it the more I scare myself, because I remember looking at the e-ticket again when I was on the tube trying to confirm that Terminal 2 is really where I wanted to go. And I scanned it back and forth, not seeing any indication what terminal I had to go to. But it didn't occur to me that this was because THERE IS NO BLOODY TERMINAL NUMBERS AT LCY! Gotta stop thinking about this now, this is driving me nuts.
More about what I've been doing and where I've been hiding/hanging out for the past month in another entry.
I was booked on a flight from London to Zurich at 19:50PM tonight. The idea was to spend the weekend back home to celebrate my best friend's 30th birthday in style. I sort of might have screwed that up, I'm afraid. I had it all planned out so well: leave the office at 5pm on the dot to make sure not to get caught up in bank holiday traffic on the tube/train to Heathrow etc. Double and triple checked on the internet that there were no tube delay yadda yadda yadda. Drove everyone crazy with being so paranoid about London's transport system. Hell, I even intended to check in online - until I found out that I couldn't do that because the UK airports don't support the online check-in system from Swiss. So I even more wanted to be there on time to make sure they didn't give my seat away to some other lucky traveller (all known to happen to lots of people, I sort of started to believe it could happen to me, too). All went according to plan and I got to LHR by 18:05PM, way earlier than I ever usually make it to an airport for a flight. And then it happened:
I FOUND OUT I WAS AT THE BLOODY WRONG AIRPORT!!!
I was so utterly shocked by my own stupidity that all I could do was laugh. There was no way I would ever make it back across the whole city to make it in time to London City Airport. Trying to get anywhere in London at that time of the day within a reasonable timeframe is impossible.
So I decided to go to the Swiss desk to find out if they would be nice enough to let me go on one of the planes from LHR instead. Me, always the optimist *rolls eyes*. Turns out that lots of people missed their flight to Zurich at 18:00 due to the Piccadilly line being horribly delayed. So all of them were furious - and queuing in front of me. Demanding to get on the next plane. No surprise there that I didn't get on that one, as it was hopelessly overbooked. You can probably imagine the looks I got from the guy behind the counter when it was finally my turn and I had to confess my terribly embarrassing story!
Bottom line: All flights to Zurich are completely sold out until Monday. So he put me on 'standby' for the 2 only flights from LCY tomorrow morning. I refused to be put on standby for the LHR ones, too. Because it takes me more than 2 hours from where I live to there - compared to 10mins on the bus to LCY. The good thing about it all is that he was so annoyed with all the other customers complaining etc that he said I will not have to pay for the change of flight - if I get on it, that is. Normally, my tickets can't be changed to other flights, so that's a bonus. But I think he probably only did it because he knows from experience that there is no way I am going to make it on either one of the flight.
Anyway, I am determined to show up at LCY at 7.20AM tomorrow morning - and hopefully me hanging around there probably losing my mind from boredom will result in me getting on one of the flights. *fingers crossed for the idiot of the month*
Gosh, I cannot even put in words how utterly totally completely idiotic I feel right now.
If I don't make the flights, I will have to eat both boxes of Leonidas chocolates to console my frustration. And - more importantly - I have to come up with a plan re. what to do for the long weekend! Maybe I'll just sit around and try to figure out what on earth went wrong in my mind when I went to LHR instead of LCY. The more I think about it the more I scare myself, because I remember looking at the e-ticket again when I was on the tube trying to confirm that Terminal 2 is really where I wanted to go. And I scanned it back and forth, not seeing any indication what terminal I had to go to. But it didn't occur to me that this was because THERE IS NO BLOODY TERMINAL NUMBERS AT LCY! Gotta stop thinking about this now, this is driving me nuts.
More about what I've been doing and where I've been hiding/hanging out for the past month in another entry.