When I woke up this morning I was very excited about flying to Wellington for the day. But the excitement changed to frustration at about 9:10 and as the day progressed things went from bad to worse! Right now I should be back in Auckland but I’m still at the airport in Wellington due to delays.
Here is what went wrong:
1) The taxi I ordered for 9:00 never turned up, I ordered another one but because I had waited so long I knew I would be cutting it fine for check in on my flight & as I was flying with Jetstar it was essential I was not late. Luckily I did make it on time.
2) The Jetstar flight was not too bad, but it was not great either. People who know me well have probably heard me say I never want to fly Jetstar ever again. But this is a work thing so I had no choice. So I was not surprised when a HUGE man squeezed himself into the seat next to me. I think he got an iPod for Xmas, coz he didn’t seem to know how to operate it properly and had awful music blaring out of it, he had headphones on and didn’t realise we could ALL hear what he was listening to, I guess the headphones weren’t plugged in properly. Thankfully he never did figure it out and didn’t bother to turn it back on after take off.
3) I decided to get Subway for lunch – so did everyone else! The queue was out the door.
4) I was in Wellington to train a group of people how to edit our intranet. Only 2 out of the 11 people turned up on time.
5) To edit the intranet you need special access rights which must be obtained before attending the course. This is explained VERY clearly in the email I send to people twice!!! 2 people did not have the correct rights & 2 people didn’t even know why they were doing the course or what they would need to do on the intranet. One had only been with us for three days and didn’t even know what the intranet is!!!
6) After about half an hour the intranet ground to a complete halt. I tried my best to entertain the people filling in time with other stuff while waiting for the intranet to come right. But after waiting 10 minutes I gave up. You can’t teach people how to edit the intranet if the intranet doesn’t work.
7) I phoned the “Help” desk to see if there was an issue. They were no help.
8) I phoned one of the IT Managers and he sorted it for me, but by this time we had sadly wasted about an hour & it’s only a two hour course. One person walked out.
9) The taxi I ordered to take me back to the airport was parked at the wrong entrance – again I had to phone the taxi company and find out what the hold up was.
10) Some sort of cable fell down on the road on the way to the airport and there was a big traffic jam. Luckily my taxi driver knew of a back way and I was not late for check in. As my return flight was with Air NZ I was not quite so stressed about being late as I was with Jetstar this morning.
11) After going through security, Air NZ announced my flight was delayed. Why did it take them that long to announce this or update the departure boards? When a plane is going to be more than an hour late arriving at an airport, surely they must know this way before they tell people to go to the gate!
12) With an extra hour to fill in I decided to have a meal – but everything looked old and manky. In utter desperation and as a result of no functioning brain cells left to help me decide what to eat I ordered a plate of fish and chips. And now I’m starting to regret that… I think I ate a dodgy fish, hope I don’t need to use the sick bag on the plane.
13) The flight was delayed two more times and it’s now more than 2 hours late.
14) The Jetstar flight to Auckland departed on time. I had to sit there and watch it take off, while I patiently waited for my beautiful Air NZ plane to turn up.
To be continued… We are about to depart 2 1/2 hours late.
It’s now 9:00 we have landed & thankfully I didn’t need to use a sick bag. But I can still feel the bad fish inside me. Anyway, I thought once we took off everything would be lovely and my mouth started watering for a beer, which is one of the perks of flying Air NZ: free beer! But of course in line with everything else that went wrong today the beer didn’t work out either…
15) Shortly after take off they announced that due to the delay in arriving at Wellington the catering company had closed and were not able to provide any food or beverages. I had a choice of water, coffee, tea, a chocolate biscuit or airplane lollies. I chose nothing.
16) My taxi drive home of course was not without incident. My lady driver is an inspector and spent the first 15 minutes sorting out naughty taxi drivers, by reporting them to head office, quoting the law and generally not concentrating on the road. I thought I was going to die!!!
17) After the reporting was done she settled back in her seat and got chatty to me. Her driving did not improve, it was terrible she did a lot of swerving between lanes and nearly ended up coming off the motorway because she left it too long to change lanes. She even answered her cell phone when it rang!
18) At last the taxi pulls up outside my house, I hand her my charge card and she has to look up some list of codes to enter into the machine. I’ve never had that happen before in all the years I’ve been using the card. She took ages to figure it all out and got it wrong. As she hands me my receipt she looks at it and said oh I’m sorry I’ve put in the international airport, will that matter? I can’t see how it would make any difference to my work, in fact I doubt they even check those details, just the amount etc. But mostly I just wanted to be home, so I said don’t worry about it. It’s now about 10pm and I’m very tired and have run out of patience. She thanked me and handed me back my card and said goodnight. I’m supposed to sign the receipt, but clearly she didn’t want me to so I got out, said goodnight and now here I am. I’ve just looked at the taxi receipt and it turns out she took sooooo long to process the transaction, it timed out and did NOT go through after all that.
And just think… I get to do it all again in 6 weeks time.
New Horizons 