Week 23

You join me at around 1.30 p.m. on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Inspired by the Tales from 35,000ft thread, I have been enthused to add some of my experiences as a consultant, but this time from a European perspective. I’ve a few weeks of experiences written up already and will add them in slowly.

It is just the time of the week where normal people would be tucking into their roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or getting a few beers ready for a hard afternoon of watching sport on the TV. However, being a consultant, and therefore not normal, my working week has already started.

I am sat in my car which is going absolutely nowhere on the M74 in Southern Scotland, allegedly on my way to Edinburgh airport to catch the 3.15 p.m. flight to Heathrow and take a connection to Zurich, but the possibility of that actually happening diminishes with every passing minute. Something has happened up ahead, and the motorway is decidedly closed. I am in danger of breaking a 25 year record by setting off from home and not making it to the airport on time.

I have a vital client meeting early tomorrow (aren’t they all vital?), and need to get to Zurich tonight. However being something like 75 minutes from Edinburgh even with a clear road and with no possibility of making it leaves me pounding the steering wheel with frustration.

Time passes, we inch forward and a junction appears where I can leave the motorway. However I am past the point of no return now for getting to Edinburgh. I call BA on the phone, and depressingly the flight is due to leave on time. It is the last opportunity to get to Zurich tonight from Scotland. A call to our travel agent tells me that there is a direct flight from Manchester to Zurich leaving at 6.30 p.m. I come off at the junction, turn the car around and set off in the opposite direction with a 2˝ hour drive ahead of me.

More time passes and after driving South in autopilot I find myself at Manchester Airport.

Whenever I have passed through MAN before, I have found it a dream airport, but today it is more like a nightmare. I start by trying to park in the short stay car park. I do this at GLA where it is relatively cheap. I wince at Manchester’s cost of Ł20 per day, but decide to go for it. Twenty minutes later, I am heading to the long stay car park because the short stay one is full to bursting with no slot to be found anywhere. My luck changes and I get a slot close to the entrance from which I can stroll to T1, enjoying the late spring sunshine.

As I arrive in the terminal, the travel agent calls to say she hasn’t booked me a ticket yet because she didn’t know when I would be returning, so I have a 10 minute delay before I can join the Swiss check in queue and get checked in. I have hopes that because it was a last minute booking I would get a business class seat (our standard is economy, but sometimes you get lucky). However the large Y printed across my boarding pass tells me that it isn’t my day. (As you will see, it wasn’t my week either, but more anon).

Passing through security I find a total zoo. It seems that the whole of North West England has decided to go on holiday today and the place is crammed with shell suited scousers and other assorted types who give the Brits a bad name on holiday. The bars must be making a fortune. Most of the time I travel on BA, BD or LH and have lounge access, but unfortunately, I have no status with Swiss and am not BA Gold (although I could make that this year), so I have no lounge to go to. I must slum it with the masses shock horror!

The large departure area is swelteringly hot, and seats are hard to find. However I find myself a perch and manage to log onto our network via the WAN system. I have a conference call to finalise the slides for tomorrow which takes place just as the gate is announced and the flight is being called. I participate in this perched on a ledge by the gate juggling laptop and phone with 100dB intrusions from the PA system. There is a race between getting to the end of the call and boarding being completed, which ends in a dead heat, so I move to get on the RJ100 that Swiss use on this route.

I stash my carry on in the overhead locker, but fail to notice that it is preventing the locker door from closing. The FA can see me, and the suitcase, and rather than do anything to help, makes a PA announcement asking all passengers to ensure that when they stow their bags, they check to see if the locker doors can close. Being more than a little peed off, at his attitude I ignore this, so he then straightens the bag, closes the door and comes over and tells me off for not doing it properly in the first place. The man is the best advertisement for BA that I have seen in a long time.

The flight is the usual boring 90 minutes. Arrive in Zurich, taxi to the Marriott, upstairs for a quick bottle of water in the exec lounge and bed.

The client meeting the next day goes well. It is in one of their offices just off Bahnhofstrasse in central Zurich, and I spend the walk their doing a little light window shopping deciding which Ł10,000 plus watch I should buy myself. Afterwards, the humid Zurich day has broken with a torrential downpour. I dodge raindrops and end up having dinner with my boss in an Italian restaurant near the lake, where he buys a suitably expensive bottle of Barolo.

The client has asked us to plan a programme of work for them. Yesterday was around getting the board aligned on the speed and scope of the programme. The next day we have another critical meeting with some of the next level managers. This is in German, and my role is to answer questions that the person presenting can’t cope with. Fortunately two of the client staff who were at Monday’s meeting are there and answer all the questions on our behalf. That is a superb outcome, both from the perspective of not having to get my German grammar working, but it also indicates that we’re getting buy in from some important people within the client’s organisation.

The rest of the week passes in a haze of meetings and calls, and soon it is Thursday when I due to head back to the UK. I have a meeting with another one of our bosses in Edinburgh on Friday (that’s why I was trying to get to Edinburgh to fly from last Sunday), and now I have a fairly hectic and complex journey ahead of me.

I’m flying Swiss back to MAN, and the journey doesn’t start well. At the gate they announce that because the plane is full, they won’t take any roll on on board. There is a farcical scene at the gate. I’m booked on a BD flight from MAN to EDI and ask them to check the bags through. They tell me that my connecting flight doesn’t exist and it takes me 10 minutes plus a session peering at their computer screen to show them the right flight. To add insult to injury, they then tell me I have to take the bag to the aircraft myself. As I will walk onto the tarmac at MAN when we arrive, I’m struggling to understand why they couldn’t do a delivery to aircraft for the bags.

Things got even dafter at MAN. I am transferring to a BD flight to EDI. At the transfer point, there is a large ticket counter for every conceivable airline except BD, then a security scan, with the BD ticket counter 10 steps beyond. I am the only passenger in the place. Because I don’t have a boarding pass or ticket (I’m travelling e-ticket of course), the man won’t let me past. After 5 minutes of discussion, a lady from the BD desk comes over and confirms that I do have a reservation, and a boarding pass will be provided. However that isn’t good enough for Johnny Jobsworth, so I have to open my laptop and use the last dregs of battery to show an e-mail of my itinerary, (which incidentally, I could easily have typed myself) before he’ll let me through. Still it could be worse, we could have the TSA in the UK (or even the German security people who IMHO make the TSA seem pleasant, efficient and customer focused).

After a G&T in the lounge, and a swift flight, we arrive in EDI on time, although my bag doesn’t. In the UK, we have a system where when you connect from a non EU international flight onto a domestic flight, you can check your bags through, but they arrive on a different luggage carousel at the final destination, presumably to let customs and excise check them.

I stand by the band for 20 minutes, bizarrely surrounded by 50 Japanese who must have been arriving for some convention off a different flight, then give up, look at the normal band, see no bag there, and go to the desk. The formalities are completed very quickly, and I get an overnight pack and jump into a taxi. 200 yards down the road, the phone rings. They’d found my bag, so the taxi driver turns around, I was reunited with the bag and left happy.

Stayed at the Hilton Edinburgh Grosvenor. Not the best hotel I’ve ever stayed in. It has character, in that it is a large old building with high-ceilinged rooms and a sort of shabby genteel look. It doesn’t feel like a Hilton, and I wasn’t surprised to hear a few days later that it was one of a dozen or so properties that Hilton UK were selling off.

It also doesn’t have a lounge, so I found myself buying breakfast which is a rare occasion. It was indescribably awful.

After my meeting with my boss and a few hours of e-mails, I head off to the airport where the EDI – MAN flight passes off without a hitch. My car is sitting in the long term car park, so I climb in, call in to see my mother for an hour, then shoot up the M6 at moderately illegal speeds to get home around 9 p.m.

The weekend is taken up by DIY with a vengeance. All married men will have gone through this sort of thing at least once in their life. Last year, my wife said it would be nice to have a shower in the large bathroom. (We have a large, old house that used to be a B&B and has two bathrooms). She then decided that while we were doing that, we could convert the smaller bathroom into a study for me, and by the way we could put an en-suite in my daughter’s bedroom on the top floor (brilliant timing as she’s at university now and will probably never move back home permanently again), oh and why don’t we move my younger son’s room up to the top floor and turn his into a guest bedroom. I started to ask her about how much it would cost and was treated as if I was something unpleasant found on the sole of a shoe, so I accepted the inevitable. The first workman started in March, and by mid May, we were around a month from getting finished. I had 101 small tasks to perform, before escaping back to work.

Great report. Thanks for posting!

Enjoyed your report, thanks!

To me, your posting highlights something that those of us that live close to the major hubs like LHR forget - that the flights and options are far more limited in choice and there is often a big difference in travelling on Sunday afternoon rather then first thing on Monday. When I've worked with teams in Europe, I've always felt the staff that weren't based in London had a tougher travel deal...

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.

Excellent posts. Looking forward to future installments

As a solid supporter of the "consultant" topics, this has been added to my collection of must reads - I love hearing how staid my life is comparably

Hopefully you will be able to post more frequently than the other two, who have gone mysteriously quiet...

wow enjoyed the read

I'm enjoying this too. Thanks.
R.

Apologies for the delay in posting. Been a bit busy.

I've decided to add a random statistic of the week as well

Week 25 (BA Miles earned last month: 28,078)

An easy week in prospect, as I have booked Thursday and Friday as holidays to celebrate my daughter’s 21st birthday.

I also have an easy start, as I work from home on Monday morning, before driving up to Glasgow to fly out to Zurich. I’ve booked the route out via LGW as it’s a faster and more convenient trip when travelling in the afternoon.

The trip down to LGW passes faultlessly, and I am soon in the terraces lounge at LGW. Logging on to the wireless network there to check my e-mails, I discover that my laptop is due for replacement, so I arrange to do the swap next week (I have to go to our London office for that), and look forward to something that is newer and better than what I have at the moment. Please don’t ask me what I’ve got. Although I’m technically switched on, I see it as totally irrelevant whether I have a 2.4GHz processor or what sort of RAM I’ve got. For typical work related stuff, these things are absolutely immaterial. The only things I need from my new laptop are a larger hard drive (basically so I can put all my music on it), and a better networking system, as my current set-up requires a lot of messing about and occasional reboots when changing from one networked environment (say office LAN) to another, (say wireless), and last, but not least fewer crashes. The Blue Screen of death appears a couple of times a week at the moment, which is way too often.

When the flight is called at LGW, I discover that the gate is one of the new ones they’ve just built, and I have to go over a huge bridge to get to them. The view from the top is pretty spectacular, and I can look down on planes landing on the distant runway. On time arrival, and taxi to the Marriott.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we work further on our material for the client, and then I manage to escape early to fly home. For some reason, OLCI hasn’t worked so I have to check in at the desk. Unfortunately, the check in agent is being particularly Swiss about cabin baggage and demands to weigh my bag. Inevitably it is too heavy. The 6Kg limit for cabin baggage on BA is ridiculous, and the agent tells me that she can’t let my bag on board for safety reasons. When I point out to her that if I were flying Club, I would be within BA’s weight limit, she shuts up. However, despite all my negotiating skills, and asides about BA losing it the last time I flew with them, I have to check it. Things get more frustrating as the agent tells me the flight is late, and I am rebooked onto a later flight to GLA.

I make my way to the lounge in Terminal E, and make myself comfortable. It is a searingly hot day, and I am sticky and thirsty. I take a litre bottle of water from the fridge, go to my seat and prepare to drink when the lounge dragon pounces. It is not permitted to take a bottle of water to your seat, only a glass. Knowing the Swiss and their ways, resistance is futile, but I make her wait until I have drained 3 glasses of water straight down, before refilling my glass for the fourth time and letting her take what is by now an almost empty bottle back to the fridge.

The flight is called and after enduring the boarding scrum, (BA’s boarding procedure at ZRH is totally, utterly and completely hopeless), I climb on board. Nothing happens for a few minutes, then the pilot comes on to tell us he has a problem with the GPS, which thinks we’re about 400 miles from Zurich, and needs to get this fixed before we take off. This doesn’t sound unreasonable to me. He tells us he wants to “control alt delete” the plane. Which presumably means shutting down all the systems and restarting them again. This doesn’t work and time passes. I call the travel agency and they tell me that the 1915 is the latest BA flight to get me back to GLA tonight. However I know there is a 1715 to LHR and wonder about getting on that (It is now 1645). At this point the captain comes on the tannoy and tells us he is still trying to get the plane fixed, and there is nothing we (the passengers) can do as there are no alternative flights to LHR tonight, As there are 2 BA flights plus 2 Swiss ones, this is a downright lie. It is compounded when he comes on 10 minutes later to tell us that BA are rebooking us all onto alternate BA and Swiss flights to LHR.

However, miracle or miracles, he suddenly announced that the problem had been fixed and we could take off. This we did and as we got nearer to London, so it seems the chances of me making my connection evaporates. The connection is due to leave at 1850 and my boarding card states that the gate will close at 1830. However, we are due to land at Terminal 4 and I will be taking off from Terminal 1. It is 1800 and we are still in a holding pattern over Kent somewhere and I am wondering when the next flight to GLA will depart and more to the point will I get a seat on it. Odds are all flights will be full until the very last one.

We finally land at LHR at around 1815, and taxi to a remote stand. To add insult to injury the bus isn’t there to take us to the terminal and people stand and wait in the cramped pre-disembarkation poses for fully 10 minutes. By this stage, my opinion of BA is so low, you would need to sink a mineshaft to reach it. However as I emerge into the London afternoon, my heart is gladdened by the sight of someone holding a card with BA1494 Glasgow on it. Together with some passengers for Cork, I am driven directly to the flight connections centre, and we are taken to security where amazingly there is no queue. After a brisk walk along the connecting corridor, I join the end of the queue at Gate 74 where the last few people are waiting to board. BA have suddenly gone up a few notches in my estimation. I shall get home at a reasonable hour after all, although probably without luggage.

When we arrive in GLA, my name is called as we are waiting to disembark. The agent tells me to go straight to the baggage office, as my bag didn’t make it across Heathrow (which I expected). What I didn’t expect was that the lady in the baggage office had the property irregularity report complete and all I had to do was to describe my case, (a black 22) and I could leave. That, in my mind is excellent customer service, and all too rare.

The only footnote is that the next morning I was woken up at 7.25 by an insufferably cheery man from the courier service to say that he had my
bag and was about to leave the airport with it there and then. The BA courier service have done this to me before, and although it is good to know my bag is safe and sound, 7.25 on a non work day is for sleeping.

The rest of the week passes most pleasantly. We go out for dinner on my daughter’s birthday, I play some golf with her (and lose, as she is becoming a veritable golf monster, playing 5 or 6 times a week), and then on Sunday we have a family lunch with relatives coming from all over the country to celebrate her birthday. The highlight of the lunch is that my mother-in-law and one of our neighbours seem to be in competition to see who can drink the most wine. The neighbour normally enjoys a drink and can be found in the local pub every night, but he seems to have met his match in my mother-in-law, who complains loudly to me that I must have watered down her wine, because she has drunk several bottles and can still stand up!

Week 26 (Year to date flight sectors:- 99)

I start the week with a trip to London to collect my new PC. I have booked an 1130 appointment to get the data transferred over and the PC set up, which means I can catch the 0905 BD flight to LHR. I’m taking a taxi to the airport this week as my kids need my car, and so I have an 0545 taxi which is relatively civilised for a Monday morning.

Those of you who can count will be wondering why I need to set off over 3 hours before the flight. Answer is that I happen to live in one of the worst possible places for a road warrior consultant to stay. We live in an obscure corner of Scotland that is 1ľ hours from Glasgow airport which in turn has a very limited set of direct flights. Why? I hear you ask, and the answer is that we moved here 9 years ago when I went to work in the area and love it so much for the scenery, the people, the pace of life and lack of stress that I’m willing to spend an extra 3+ hours per week commuting to the airport.

I must confess I like British Midland more than BA, and have done for some time. The basic reason why is that they know they are much smaller than BA and generally try harder to compete. Their lounges do tend to have a much better selection of reading material than BA and at Glasgow both the business and diamond club lounges are huge with plenty of room to sit even at peak periods. In contrast, the BA Glasgow lounge is small, cramped and almost invariably overcrowded.

Diamond Club is much better in terms of earning points and benefits than BA, although redeeming miles on BD (as opposed to other *A carriers) can be nigh on impossible, especially long haul. Do their US flights always run full? That can be the only explanation of the fact that there is never seat availability on their website months in advance.

I also love their egg mayo sandwiches that they serve on their short haul flights. However this may change because they have announced what sounds to me a slightly half baked plan to offer low cost service (buy your own food) etc at “tiny” prices whereas people like me who tend to book last minute flexible economy fares will end up paying an awful lot of money for no in flight service.

Back to the plot, and following an on time arrival and Heathrow Express journey, I find a mile long queue for the taxis at Paddington. It takes about 30 seconds to walk up onto the main road and hail a cab, and we head off for our office which is South of the river. We take a typical taxi driver’s route where we do not head in the same direction for more than 30 seconds at a time, but I do get to see parts of London I’ve never seen before.

After dropping off my PC, I’m told it will be about 3 – 4 hours and suddenly I have nothing to do. All of my colleagues will be spread around Europe working at clients, and all my work is on my laptop. I chance across a colleague who is working on a proposal and spend an hour with her, discussing some of the details of the work. (It will be in a small town in Turkey, about 2 hours from Istanbul, so I politely decline her offer to add my CV to the list of those proposed for the project).

Then I really am at a loose end, so I walk over the bridge into Trafalgar Square and lose myself for an hour in the National Gallery. As a decidedly average amateur photographer, I am fascinated by light, and it seems to me that these old masters knew their light very well and had a skill in reproducing light in a way that photographers find extremely difficult to emulate at times.

One other thing I notice is that there are a number of parties of schoolchildren visiting the Gallery. People talk about childhood obesity, but based on the 5 or 6 parties that I see here today, it does seem to be more of an issue in London (and presumably other large cities) than in rural Scotland were there are far fewer really large children around. Perhaps the outdoor life and lack of buses cancels out the deep fried Mars Bars.

Next I walk up Charing Cross Road to Foyles, where I spend a pleasant hour firstly looking at some technical books, then buying something much lighter to read. I am a great fan of Amazon, but there is something special about browsing the shelves of a well stocked bookshop. Foyles in London and Blackwells in Oxford are my two favourites, as they seem to offer much more than the standard fare that can be found in any identikit branch of Waterstones.

Returning to base, my new laptop is ready, and I spend an hour getting used to some of its foibles before heading off to LHR again. I have the trip to LHR off to a tee, and if timed correctly can be in the lounge 35 minutes after leaving the office, However today I am heading to T4 and it takes a little longer, not least due to the security line.

The flight to ZRH is on time and uneventful. Zurich is hot and sticky after the air conditioned cool of the Airbus, and it is good to get into the hotel and cool down again.

We spend Tuesday in our Zurich office, fine tuning the deliverables for our client, then on Wednesday, I have a meeting with the client to review and hand over the documents. Before this, I have some preparation to do, but nothing that requires me to go into the office, so I spend the morning working in the Marriott executive lounge, enjoying the air conditioning, the views of Zurich and the coffee and cake in equal measures.

My meeting is at 5.30 and at lunchtime, I escape for an hour, using my beloved Pentax LX to take photographs of the numerous bears that are scattered around the city centre. For some reason, the city fathers of Zurich have commissioned several hundred statues of bears from various artists, each one individually designed and decorated, They are a photographer’s dream, colourful and quirky. Themes range from Superbear and Spiderbear through to one wearing stockings and suspenders which, I understand caused a huge fuss when it was first unveiled. After an hour’s circuit, I return to the hotel for a shower and change.

The meeting will take place in a small town around 20 miles from Zurich and I take the excellent local train systems to arrive at the clients office around 5.15 p.m. for the 5.30 meeting. The meeting goes very well and the client is delighted with the material we have prepared for him. We part with a handshake and I walk back to the railway station where I am confronted by a very un-Swiss sight. All the trains have stopped and hundreds of people are milling around the station. According to the announcement there has been a total power failure across the entire Swiss railway system and all trains have stopped.

To add to the problems it is incredibly hot and sticky and my mobile phone has stopped working.

Normally there are a few taxis parked outside the station, but they are long gone. There is a bus station nearby, but it only seems to have local buses, so I’m thinking about options when a taxi pulls up. I’m totally convinced that someone has booked him, but decide to have a go, so I pull open the door open and ask “sind Sie Frei?” Amazingly the answer is yes, so I jump in and direct the driver to Zurich. As we drive, details of the chaos come over the radio. The entire Swiss railway system has been shut down completely due to this power outrage. It is, needless to say, the first time that this has ever happened and there is a sense of chaos in this well ordered society.

There are broken down trains scattered across the country, without air conditioning and opening windows on a very hot evening. What is worse is that some trains are almost certainly stranded in the tunnels under the alps. I ring the other members of the project team, one of whom lives in Basel, but fortunately, she left for home early and is unaware of the problem when I call her,

As we approach Zurich, the traffic builds up and is heavy, but not ridiculous. I arrive at the hotel relieved and happy to give the driver a generous tip.

I meet with a couple of colleagues in the bar, and we drink beer and put the world to rights for an hour or two, although I do crash early, as I have a heavy day to look forward to on Thursday.

I have another meeting with the client in Stuttgart, where I will meet with another colleague who is based in Zurich. I have decided to fly there and back in the day, so start with an 0545 taxi to the airport, and a Swiss flight to Stuttgart. It is a very short flight in an Embraeder and this passes without incident. I’ve done this in business before where I was offered no less than three glasses of champagne in 40 minutes. Today in economy, we get a small square of chocolate each. It is, however quite delicious.

I am met at Stuttgart airport by my colleague from Zurich and the partner from our Stuttgart office for this job. My colleague had decided to take the train to Stuttgart last night and had arrived at Zurich main station just after the power failure. He said that there were tens of thousands of people there waiting for the trains to start running again (apparently the power was off for about 3 hours). The Swiss community spirit kicked in and there was singing of traditional Swiss songs. He, however took the tram home and got in his car to drive to Stuttgart, arriving around 1 a.m.

We drive to the client’s office where the partner leaves us (probably the highest paid chauffeur I’ve ever had). We are meeting with two of the client’s technical staff to talk through the approach we will adopt with this project. The day is extremely painful. Firstly the senior client staff member has breath that would probably be classed as a WMD if it was found in Iraq, and secondly, as we discover at lunch, he would be a strong contender in the world boring championships. I pretend to listen in rapt admiration as he explains the intricacies of the Chinese alphabet over lunch.

As far as the work content goes, it is even worse. He has some totally half baked ideas and is adamant that he is right and the rest of the world is wrong. It seems that he wants us to simply implement his agenda, rather than use our skills and experience to solve the problems that his company has. We get through the day somehow, then stop off at a bar for a welcome and well deserved beer, before I head to the airport for the short flight back to Zurich and another chunk of delicious chocolate.

One of my colleagues from the UK will be taking the next stage of the Swiss job further, and I am due to meet with him tonight to prepare him for his first client meeting tomorrow. We meet up and go for a pizza at a restaurant in Zurich and I start to brief him on his material for Friday. Although it is 8.30 in the evening and we are sitting outside, it feels like a sauna. We stroll back to the hotel and crash ahead of Friday’s meeting.

Friday is one of those crazy days. We have prepared and signed off the material for the client meeting that afternoon, but as is always the case, the person who is delivering it, my colleague from England wants it tweaked to suit his personal preferences. We spend the morning going through it, bringing him up to speed and making minor changes so that it is just right in his eyes, then after lunch, print it out and pack him off to the client for his meeting.

This allows me to escape to the airport and catch a flight home. The BA flight to LHR passes well, but when I arrive in LHR, I have a voice message from my colleague, the meeting went well, but the client wants some tweaks made to the material and can I go back to Zurich on Monday to do this.

Amazingly, I can, as I have Monday booked working with some colleagues on a job in Frankfurt, so I ring them and postpone our meeting till Tuesday, then sit in the Diamond Club lounge and book an incredibly complex and expensive ticket for the next week (GLA – LHR – ZRH – FRA – STR – BHX – GLA). It is further complicated by the fact that the ZRH – FRA leg goes via MUC as there isn’t any availability on the direct flight.

Full marks to British Midland. It is a very hot day and they have added a jug of Pimms to their usual selection of drinks in the lounge. I partake with pleasure of the quintessentially English summer drink. Refreshing, moreish and ultimately potent.

British Midland whisk me up to GLA and supply me with a G&T and Egg Mayo sandwich. I calculate that if their mad new no frills model goes ahead, I will drink 15 fewer G&T and eat 30 fewer sandwiches per year which will probably have a positive effect on my waistline. However, as I will probably switch my allegiance to BA, it is an academic question.

My taxi driver is waiting at the other end and he whisks me home. After a couple of G&Ts (1 from BA, 1 from BD) and a few glasses of Pimms, I’m glad someone is there to drive me, as I’d certainly be unfit to drive otherwise.

Thegoderic, love your writing style and it helps me get through my 2 months on the ground experience.

Can understand your frustration with BD, I've been chatting to Aisle Seat H and reading the BD Forum for some much needed mirth lately as BD seem to lurch from one bad decision to another.

Look forward to your exploits next week!!

I'm posting these a few weeks behind. It's finding time that's the issue. At this moment I'm on hold to BA trying to sort out a mileage run I had planned to LIS for this weekend. Been on hold for just over 1 hour now.

*bump*

Well, now you're 7 months behind in posting, thegoderic. Must be quite a tome by now...