On my second-last day on a cargo/IT project I was supposed to travel to Cologne with my replacement, Edem, and show him the ropes. BA doesn't have many flights to Cologne each day, so we had to catch a 7am commuter flight in order to have time to do the job & get back. Travelling so much, I had developed checking in at the last moment to a fine art - I knew exactly how long it took to get to the tube, & thence to Heathrow. However, this particular morning, traffic was unbelievably slow (an accident), & the usually fast Piccadilly line crawled along. I arrived with minutes to spare, ran to the ticket desk where I'd told Edem to meet me - and he wasn't there! It seemed that he hadn't checked in either... He'd gone to the *other* BA ticket desk, and by the time I found him it was too late to check in... So we had to fly to Dusseldorf instead, and the Cologne BA station manager had to drive an hour each way to collect us...

One of my colleagues went to Africa early in the project. He was supposed to fly from Gatwick to Harare, & thence to Nairobi. But his car broke down on the way to the airport, and he completely missed the Harare flight - so he flew to Nairobi via Dar es Salaam instead. These are late-night flights, so he couldn't phone anyone to let them know what had happened - nobody knew where he was for the next 24 hours. Dar can be hell-hole, for those of you who haven't been there - it's almost on the equator, & is incredibly hot & humid all year round. In addition, Swahili is the dominant language - very few people speak passable English (this was Andy's first time in Africa). When he got to Dar he didn't have the requisite yellow-fever vaccination documentation, so he had to bribe his way across the airport to get to his Nairobi flight...