Airport Adventures

Greetings from Moscow, loyal readers. I'm currently holed up in a hotel in the Petrovsky district, about 4km north of the city centre. I've been here less than 24 hours and I already have many tales to recount, including Dutch incompetence (no surprise there then), corrupt taxi drivers, cheese holes (squeal!), unsafe-safes, a Siberian wildcat in a plastic fish tank and Russian fashion. Unfortunately, I am supposed to be working so most of it will all have to wait until later.

It's a miracle I actually got here at all, what with the ridiculous system KLM have got going on at the airport these days. So basically, you now do all the work yourself on the 'we've-put-these-self-service-machines-here-so-you-think-
you're-in-control-of-your-own-travel-details-but-really-
they-are-only-there-so-we-can-employ-even-less-
incompetent-staff' machines. They employ a couple of blue-clad donkey-brained assistants who know less about the machine than anyone who has used it twice before. "It doesn't find my reservation," I say. "Put in your booking number/e-ticket number/passport," one of them says, helpfully. Already done that lady, now what? So, she takes my paper, and types in the number, hitting the screen as hard as she can, as if the extra force is going to penetrate the system and miraculously come up with my reservation.

She suddenly realises that I am flying with Aeroflot, although the flight is operated by KLM, and tells me that I must go to the Aeroflot desk in the other terminal. Hmmm. "But the screen says I must check in at 14. You should change that then," I protest. "Oh," she says, "The screen is managed by the airport and not KLM. It's not my fault it is wrong." It's pretty late, and I am worried I won't make the flight, so I resist arguing with her some more, which, I might add, was difficult, and leg it off to Departures 3 to find the Aeroflot desk, which doesn't actually exist, although of course I did not know that at this point, and almost get executed by the machine-gun toting guards at the El-Al check in when I run across the cordoned-off bit, looking wild eyed and sweaty and muttering "Aeroflot? Aeroflot? AER-O-FLOT?" at anyone who will listen.

I see some more KLM staff at the 'ground service' desk and ask them if they know where I can find the Aeroflot desk. No one answers. I've lost all patience. "Hello?" I wave my hand in front of a girl's face. She raises her eyebrows and says, "What?". Blood is beginning to boil. "One of your colleagues told me to find the Aeroflot desk in this terminal to check in for my KLM flight, where is it please?'. She shrugs and says, 'Can I see your boarding pass?'. I grit my teeth and mutter, 'The point is, I don't have one yet. She told me to come to this terminal to get it.' Her colleague starts saying something about me in Dutch and, I smile sweetly and tell him, in Dutch, that I understand Dutch. He turns round and gets very busy all of a sudden.

"You have to go to check in 14, which is what it says on the screen," she says. Explosion. I tell her that I am not stupid or blind and I know what is says on the screen. She just shrugs. I decide I need to go back to the other terminal and get in the queue-to-talk-to-a-human-being-with-a-slightly-more-
well-trained-donkey-brain-and-who-has -climbed-high-enough-up-the-ladder-to-be-able-to-sit-at-a-desk with all the other people whose bookings were spat out by the self help machines. Self help. You need a session of self help after trying to get on a flight these days.

I stand in a queue for 45 minutes with all the other people who had been told to go and find a desk that didn't exist and, by the time I get to the desk, it's 10 minutes before my flight takes off. "Right," says the woman, "You're bag won't make the flight." Goody, I think, because that means I will and the bag will join me later. I can live without my secret stash of cheese blocks for a few hours. "And neither will you," She adds. WTF? Not even a translation error could mean that someone comes up with a sentence order so illogically stupid! "The flight is overbooked and you're on standby that's why the machine rejected your reservation. And now the flight has closed. Sorry. There's nothing I can do." Explosion number two.

"Listen. here.matey.I.tried.to.check.in.over.an.hour.and.a.half.ago...," I said, my teeth clenched together so hard I could hardly formulate the words. "It is not MY FAULT that your INCOMPETENT colleague told me to go to another terminal, where I spent 45 minutes searching for something that is harder to find than a matching pair of socks in my sock drawer, which is very hard thank you very much, and then I spent almost an hour queuing up here to talk to one of the three people that KLM thinks can adequately deal with the thousands of people checking in this morning, and you tell me that the flight is closed?" She looks a bit startled. I must say, I probably look a like I should be sedated and strapped down. After all the running about, I do look a bit wild, coupled with the 2 hours sleep and slight hangover. "We can put you on the Aeroflot flight tonight at 23:00, is that ok?" she says, smiling. It's 09:30. Explosion number three. "No. I want to go on my flight, the one that YOUR INCOMPETENT colleague, which is that donkey standing right over there by the way, caused me to ALMOST miss." She purses her lips and then picks up the phone. "Alright," she says after negotiating with someone, "If you can take that bag on as hand luggage, you can fly, but you have to run to the gate." DONE.

So, off I ran, all the way to the other side of the airport. When I got to the plane there was still a massive queue and so I had not needed to half kill myself getting there. There was a Russian man behind me who I though was about to have a heart attack. "Did they tell you to run too?" I asked. He nodded, clutching onto his trolley for moral support. I had to throw away half of my toiletries but in the end I got a business class seat, which was nice, even though I had to sit next to an enormously large man on one side who leaked over into my seat, and a chemical engineer from Durham on the other side. I am not quite sure which one was worse.

Ok, I've got to go and do some setting-up now...so more later...