Some Classic DYKWIA Behaviour in T5 North Galleries
 

Sat down this afternoon in one of those clusters of armchairs to the left of the BA Information Desk in T5 North Lounge. There are 5 (maybe 6) separate power outlets in the arm of a few of these chairs and this bloke in the widow of the cluster I sat in was using every single one. He was charging 2 phones, an I-Pad, a laptop and an electric shaver. Now not every chair has power outlets so I politely asked him to disconnect one....he refused saying, "no, sorry but I need to charge all my devices for my flight".

So I waited until he got up to go the loo / got a sandwich and then I took great delight in personally unplugging every single one of his devices and plugged my single charger in. I gestured to 2-3 others in the adjacent chairs to come and plug their devices in - which they gratefully did :D

His face was a picture when he came back, he scowled / glared / muttered, gathered his stuff (all his gadgets and gizmos) and skulked off. Result!! :D:D

I think a single user keeping all the outlets to himself when he knows others need them as well is pretty self absorbed and seems especially rude when you're asked for one out of five.
But...I don't like the idea of messing with other people's stuff while they're moving about the lounge. Even DYKWIA's stuff.
I feel like there is an unstated agreement among lounge users that our stuff is safe and will be left alone if we go to grab a coffee or some food or whatever. Without that understanding, let's have combination lockers with internal power outlets at each seat.

Let's have some decent maintenance of the power outlets.... Put stickers on the bad ones and replace them asap!

The fact that so many are broken is not normal!

What RW doesn't carry a plug strip, though? I have a 3-outlet device that's the size of a candy bar and easily fits in my laptop bag.

Whilst he was anti social so were you. Actually I think you were the worst behaved.

How would you like it if other people came and moved or touched your stuff whilst you were getting some food and drink or went for a pee?

You wouldn't would you and I bet you'd even post on here about how your things were touched and how unacceptable it was.

I don't think this is unreasonable to be honest because lounge charging capacity is not really measured by the number of sockets, but in socket-hours (i.e. number of sockets x number of hours the lounge is open per day, or if you like the number of sockets x number of hours that a given person is in the lounge).

If the person in question took two sockets three times to fully charge the six devices he would use exactly the same amount of charging capacity. Using all six sockets at once means that more sockets are free later, which is not unambiguously better or worse that the situation observed.

Most people will be in there for 30 to 60 minutes or maybe even more, but there are so many flights that every couple of minutes a socket will become free. In that time any given passenger is likely to find the sockets they need if they look hard enough. And if they are in there for less time then probably their devices would not get a good charge anyway, so it does not matter. And if they forget before the last 20 minutes then they should have been more organised.

:)

I wonder how he would survive in a place without electricity. Those eco resorts must be hell for him ;)

Additionally, Sixth Freedom's argument is rather fair, yet it would be so much more courteous if he were to charge some of his devices on the USB ports of his laptop or something... that said, the terms 'courteous' and 'DYWKIA' shares the relationship of water and oil :D

He needed to charge his electric shaver for the flight? How much on-board shaving is he doing?!

The laptop would be able to charge at least two other devices. Just pure greediness/laziness. I appreciate you taking action but I would have notified staff instead.

I'm afraid your argument has a couple of holes and does not retain much water because:
(a) most people do not have 6 devices to charge, but one or two, and
(b) latency, or service-wait-time, is important here.

Many passengers do not have time to wait for another device to charge before charging theirs, so two device-charge intervals. Most also have one device that is important to charge, others are secondary. So therefore the critical capacity number for passengers to achieve what they need (charge the most important device now) is number of passengers charging at one time, not some charger-hour usage metric. Assuming that charging all devices of one passenger in parallel is equivalent to charging them in sequence is assuming that passengers have infinite time to wait, and they clearly do not.

In queueing or data network terms, we need quality of service controls to prevent congestion of the available resource by over-consumers causing denial of service to other consumers within the required service time . In British terms: Form an orderly queue and don't use more than one socket when others are waiting.

(for example in this particular case, I doubt the gentleman at issue needed to charge his shaver; shaver power is available in-flight even in cabins without at-seat power, and he could certainly charge his shaver at his destination hotel (or arrival lounge) also)