This is Door 16.
“Unaccompanied baggage reclaim” is an euphemism for “here you can get your luggage the next day because the bastards at Heathrow Airport managed to lose your suitcase even if you had a 5 hour layover.”
My flight to London was doomed. Not because of the recent terrorist attacks, but because we had a VIP on board. Dressed in a white futuristic suit with excessive padding on the shoulders Mr. RaÎl himself was on the plane. He, for the uninitiated, is the founder of the RaÎlian sect, known for their supposedly first cloning of a human. And he claims he is in regular contact with the aliens who will be coming to earth to save us. Or something like that, I’m sure they have a web site where you can look it up yourself. I can’t because I’m at London Heathrow at the moment, waiting for my connecting flight to Amsterdam. But I’m ahead of the story.
About the same time I saw Rael boarding I found out I didn’t have my boarding pass anymore. A sure sign of the alien overlords taking over. I probably lost it when they swiped my computer in search of explosives. They handed it back to me, but since I also got my computer back I probably put it down for a moment. I asked the guy at the check-in desk I had to go down all the way to the luggage check but he said “No problem Sir, I’ll just print a new boarding pass for you.” And so he did. And he told me I could get a new boarding pass for the second leg of my trip in London. So far so good. After an uneventful flight (I even managed to sleep almost three hours!) I got that boarding pass indeed. But when I boarded my delayed British Midland flight to Amsterdam they refused to let me on board. I needed a ticket coupon, which was also lost because it was in the same So even though my name was on the passenger list, I had miraculously flown to London and I had a valid boarding pass, I couldn’t come on board. “You’ll have to go back to the ticket desk and buy a new ticket.” I nearly exploded but managed to control my anger. They didn’t need another explosion here.
After going through the almost 30 minutes long line for the luggage check for the second time in two hours, I went to the British Midland desk were they directed my problems to the British Airways support desk. After I explained the situation over and over to several people they agreed to issue a replacement ticket, but they had to charge me 25 British Pounds. Even though I didn’t want to I caved because I was sick of the whole situation.
Printing the new ticket took a log time because the British Airways clerk had to retype my ticket info (about 80 characters of gibberish) over and over again because it gave an error whenever he made only a 1 character mistake, and he could start over again. So charging 40 euros for the new ticket was actually very cheap. But it caused me to miss the next flight as well, so I’ll spent in total more than 5 hours in Heathrow. And I hated Heathrow already. But since British Airways is the only company that has the kind of tickets that I want for a reasonable price (tickets were the different legs of the trip are almost a year apart) I’m afraid I’ll come here more often in the future. Unless I totally refrain from visiting my relatives and friends in the Netherlands. Which, as I sit here in this shopping mall turned airport, seems almost a nice idea.
Epilogue: Of course my luggage was missing when I arrived in Amsterdam. So instead or going to my mother I was forced to go to a friend. There I had supper and after that slept pretty well.
Today (wednesday 26) I’m heading for Schiphol to get my suitcase (Yay!) and then to Rotterdam to drop it off and then to my mother.
Jul 25 2005
Flight
This is Door 16.
“Unaccompanied baggage reclaim” is an euphemism for “here you can get your luggage the next day because the bastards at Heathrow Airport managed to lose your suitcase even if you had a 5 hour layover.”
My flight to London was doomed. Not because of the recent terrorist attacks, but because we had a VIP on board. Dressed in a white futuristic suit with excessive padding on the shoulders Mr. RaÎl himself was on the plane. He, for the uninitiated, is the founder of the RaÎlian sect, known for their supposedly first cloning of a human. And he claims he is in regular contact with the aliens who will be coming to earth to save us. Or something like that, I’m sure they have a web site where you can look it up yourself. I can’t because I’m at London Heathrow at the moment, waiting for my connecting flight to Amsterdam. But I’m ahead of the story.
About the same time I saw Rael boarding I found out I didn’t have my boarding pass anymore. A sure sign of the alien overlords taking over. I probably lost it when they swiped my computer in search of explosives. They handed it back to me, but since I also got my computer back I probably put it down for a moment. I asked the guy at the check-in desk I had to go down all the way to the luggage check but he said “No problem Sir, I’ll just print a new boarding pass for you.” And so he did. And he told me I could get a new boarding pass for the second leg of my trip in London. So far so good. After an uneventful flight (I even managed to sleep almost three hours!) I got that boarding pass indeed. But when I boarded my delayed British Midland flight to Amsterdam they refused to let me on board. I needed a ticket coupon, which was also lost because it was in the same So even though my name was on the passenger list, I had miraculously flown to London and I had a valid boarding pass, I couldn’t come on board. “You’ll have to go back to the ticket desk and buy a new ticket.” I nearly exploded but managed to control my anger. They didn’t need another explosion here.
After going through the almost 30 minutes long line for the luggage check for the second time in two hours, I went to the British Midland desk were they directed my problems to the British Airways support desk. After I explained the situation over and over to several people they agreed to issue a replacement ticket, but they had to charge me 25 British Pounds. Even though I didn’t want to I caved because I was sick of the whole situation.
Printing the new ticket took a log time because the British Airways clerk had to retype my ticket info (about 80 characters of gibberish) over and over again because it gave an error whenever he made only a 1 character mistake, and he could start over again. So charging 40 euros for the new ticket was actually very cheap. But it caused me to miss the next flight as well, so I’ll spent in total more than 5 hours in Heathrow. And I hated Heathrow already. But since British Airways is the only company that has the kind of tickets that I want for a reasonable price (tickets were the different legs of the trip are almost a year apart) I’m afraid I’ll come here more often in the future. Unless I totally refrain from visiting my relatives and friends in the Netherlands. Which, as I sit here in this shopping mall turned airport, seems almost a nice idea.
Epilogue: Of course my luggage was missing when I arrived in Amsterdam. So instead or going to my mother I was forced to go to a friend. There I had supper and after that slept pretty well.
Today (wednesday 26) I’m heading for Schiphol to get my suitcase (Yay!) and then to Rotterdam to drop it off and then to my mother.
By mare • english •