Week 24

The week starts with a 0700 flight from GLA. I live about 75 minutes from GLA, so choose to travel up and stay in the Holiday Inn at the airport on the Sunday night. I am a Priority Club Platinum member, not through stays, but by redeeming 100,000 Amex membership miles last year for our holiday. The Priority Club system seemed to recognise these as valid for status and I went straight to Platinum with about 3 stays in the last 12 months. It did help on holiday, and the family enjoyed the view from the exec floor room and the lounge breakfasts in the Crowne Plaza Seattle.

The Holiday Inn at Glasgow airport is very convenient, being only a two minute walk from the terminal, but the service is, shall we say mixed. It is almost impossible to get the desk staff to arrange a wake up call. If you ask, they provide incomprehensible instructions as to how to do this via the TV. I use my mobile phone as an alarm, but I wonder how many people try to use the TV and find themselves waking up after their flight is gone. The other quirk of the hotel is that it occasionally offers me a half bottle of wine as a Platinum guest, but that only seems to happen about one stay in three. As I’m inevitably arriving late for an early departure, I won’t want to drink it and it is simply more weight to carry around, so I’m not really bothered whether I get it or not. FWIW, the rates at this hotel are often lower than those at the Holiday Inn Express which is about 400 yards away.

Another thing about the hotel is that it is within walking distance of the terminal and the food in the bar is not bad. The quality is streets ahead of the airport fast food emporia and the atmosphere is much nicer. Incidentally, they do a mean sausage and mash.

I’d discovered a new route to Zurich and decided to try GLA – BRS – ZRH with BA. Overall journey time is 90 minutes shorter than the traditional GLA – LHR – ZRH, which means an extra hour in bed for the relatively civilised start with an 0700 flight instead of the 0605 LHR cattle truck.

It is an excellent journey. Both planes are EMB regional jets with a 2 + 1 configuration. I’d grabbed the single emergency exit seats on both sectors using OLCI, and the flight to BRS is excellent. I’d only ever been to BRS once many years ago, and the airport has had a major makeover since then and is a delight. Although as a transit passenger, you have to go landside and do security again, that takes about 90 seconds all in.

Get on the bus to the plane to ZRH and come across a colleague who lives in Cheltenham and was similarly enthusiastic about the route.

The plane is half empty (or half full depending on your outlook on life). There is also some wonderful free entertainment at take off. The lady opposite me had bought a bunch of stuff from the newsagents at the airport, and carefully placed it in the W.H. Smith plastic bag underneath the empty seat next to her. As the plane takes off, the bag stays where it was, but the contents, (a couple of magazines and some chocolate) slide gracefully backwards and end up three rows behind. She was totally unaware that this had happened, but being the gentleman that I am, I tell her and the stewardess very kindly retrieves it.

After take off, the service was swift, and I get 30 minutes of work done on my laptop before my battery starts to go and so I wander up to join my colleague. He is clearly dedicated to his work and is hard at the Sudoko puzzle in the day’s Independent. I am also an addict, and had already polished off the relatively simple puzzle in the Daily Mail. However the Independent has three every day, easy, moderate and hard and Geoff was working on the hard version. After chatting, I go back to my seat for landing, and we go our separate ways, he to one client in Zurich, me to my client a little way outside.

I meet with Geoff in the Marriott lounge that evening. We discussed work, but he is still beavering away at his Independent Sudoko.

Following the meetings the previous week, the client’s board had asked for us to prepare four options to be presented back by 5 p.m. on Thursday. We work out what these options entailed on Monday, then start work on the detailed slides on Tuesday.

Part way through Tuesday morning and disaster strikes! I get a cup of coffee and spill in on the desk. What seems like a few drops hit my laptop which dies immediately. Panic ensues, although most key data for the presentation is already shared around the group, it renders me unable to work and worried about the data on the hard drive that I’d last backed up, a month or so ago...

After a chat with our call centre in India to register the issue, a Swiss based colleague puts me onto the local support and I walk to one of our local offices which just happens to be a few hundred yards away and pick up a temporary spare machine. The technician swaps hard drives, and there is a heart stopping moment when the loan machine started up, but miraculously, the hard drive was untouched by its close encounter with an espresso. However, I can only have this machine till the end of the week, so need to take my broken machine back to the UK to get it repaired and get a long term replacement.

Around 10 p.m. and still working on the presentation, we were getting hungry, and the client lead proudly tells us that he had ordered pizzas. A few minutes later, a dozen pizza boxes arrive, and are distributed. The guy who bought them opens his box, then screams in anguish. Although the pizza boxes were, well pizza sized, inside is a much smaller cardboard frame holding tiny pizzas. We make do with what we had, and then get back to work. I am interrupted at around 11 p.m. by a text message from Geoff stating that he had finally cracked Monday’s Sudoko.

We continue through till around 0330 when we give up for the night. One of our Swiss partners gives me a lift back to the hotel. I crash for a very short night’s sleep, as we had arranged a conference call with the senior partner at 0700 the next day to review the output. This results in a personal first. I participate in the call totally horizontal, still in bed with the cell phone in loudspeaker mode perched on my chest. Good news was that the partner was happy with the output. I drift back to sleep for a while, then am woken by my boss, ringing from Scotland. We have a team meeting planned for the Thursday where everyone from the practice would get together, followed by a day’s sailing on Friday. However, there was a critical meeting with another client in Stuttgart on Friday, and could I participate? I am half asleep at the time of the call and don’t give a totally coherent answer. An hour later, having showered, eaten breakfast and rejoined the human race, I ring him back to say I can do it, and it is very clear from his tone that I have made the right decision in saying yes.

It will be a pity to miss the team meeting as we are scattered to the four corners of Europe

This left me with several dilemmas. We had the presentation to finish for Thursday, I had to get my laptop back to the London office and I had to get to this client meeting in Stuttgart on Friday. However, the presentation was 90% there, following our marathon session on Tuesday, so I decided to fly back to London on Thursday, drop the laptop off and then fly back to Stuttgart on Thursday afternoon, meet my colleague who would be co-presenting on Thursday night in the hotel, deliver the presentation on Friday morning and fly home Friday evening.

Simple in theory, interesting in practice. I finished work around 1130 on the Wednesday evening, got back to the hotel just after midnight, set the alarm cal for 0545, left the hotel at 0600 and was on a flight to LHR. Normally I travel with a 20” roll bag and have a very small laptop bag, but this week I had a large pull along briefcase, so I checked my roll bag at Zurich through to Stuttgart. The flight to LHR was excellent. I’d used OLCI to get an emergency exit row on an A321, and spent a good 20 minutes chatting with the steward. He had done a degree in aeronautical engineering and had some interesting insights into the difference between Boeing and Airbus designs. I, in turn told him of the no flaps emergency landing I’d had at LHR a few weeks previously.

Arrived in LHR, Heathrow express to Paddington, taxi to the office, swapped defective laptop for a new long term temporary replacement, got up to date on e-mails, back to LHR and got into the T1 lounge to work on the e-mails and presentations with a glass of chardonnay. With wireless networking, it’s just as good as being at work.

Flight to STR was totally uneventful until I landed, and discovered no luggage. Grrr. BA doesn’t have a lost baggage desk in the luggage hall at STR, you have to go landside and go to the ticket desk by the check in. I got there ahead of a queue of people and processed the usual paperwork. I then had a problem in that I had a client meeting the next day, and although I had my suit on, my shirt was looking decidedly the worse for wear and I had no tie. I knew my Amex card offered some lost baggage insurance, so I found a shop in the airport selling clothes and bought a shirt and tie,

Now here’s a moral dilemma. As far as shirts are concerned, the shop only has a few and they are relatively cheap, especially for an airport shop. As far as ties are concerned, there is a choice between some at €30 and Hugo Boss ties at €70. I would never ever pay that much for a tie, but I decide that as Amex are paying, I can indulge myself, so I am the proud owner of a smart and very expensive tie.

At the Marriott, I meet with a colleague and we drink beer and prepare for our presentation the next day. I get to bed just after midnight, and the front desk calls me around 1230 to tell me that my luggage has arrived.

The meeting with the client went well. We’re closing in on a small sale that could lead to a large job, and they wanted confidence in the details of our previous experience. The meeting is conducted in German, and although I manage to understand all that is going on, I have to use English at times in making some points to the client. If we get this job, I’ll have to work on my German skills.

Call in at our Stuttgart office to debrief, then get to the airport in plenty of time. The BA lounge gets very crowded on a Friday afternoon, but I manage to bag a seat in the corner and work away on the laptop till the flight is called.

The STR – BHX – GLA route is good and fast with a short connecting at BHX. Today, the flight is 45 minutes late arriving in BHX and I get walked through by a BA lady and despite having to go landside and back through security, it takes me precisely 7 minutes between getting off one plan and sitting down on the next. I love these small airport connections for speed and lack of hassle, The only problem will be when planes are seriously late, and you find you’ve missed the only flight for the next 6 hours.