(Why does M get angry?)
M is normally a very amiable person who always goes out of his way to make people comfortable. Such are the idiosyncrasies of our Maker, that He has decided to try M’s patience by doing the following things:
a. Thou shall get out of your comfort zone of Zurich and go to Chennai, India at least once a month – sometimes thrice!
b. Thine flights will always be changed in the last minute
c. Thine luggage will always arrive at Chennai few hours before you leave that great city
d. Thou shall travel by Air France as much as possible
e. To compensate, thou shall be blessed with Taj Coromandel stay in Chennai
If M is still going to go to Chennai next week, it is purely due to the fact that Jet Airways has good “Shah Rukh Khan” movies to complement the Dom Perignon!!
Truly inquisitive to know how India ended up like this, he decided to refer to history and has taken to reading the history of the region and often comes up with such questions as: “What happened to Sarat Chandra Bose, the brother of Subhash Chandra Bose?” Now, we are not even sure what happened to Subhash, let alone his brother Sarat… Digressing, as usual…
This post is to show-case M’s sudden philosophical approach towards life in general and towards Air France in particular, after a particularly memorable experience in February this year.
Sit back and enjoy…
Air France - Global Disaster in Progress: Episode IV - Paris
Against general practice, Air France seems to indulge in loading the economy section of its planes through one aisle only, which allows the staff to prolong the enjoyable close customer contact during boarding for an extended period. Business Class passengers (éspace d'affaires) can board the plane whenever they want to, meaning that they can join the economy passengers in their quest to get through the single boarding door into the single boarding aisle. Of course, this provides ample time to reflect why Air France calls its economy class "TEMPO".
The èspace d'affaires seat complies to the standard un-comfortableness of a Lufthansa seat for short passengers. You can't stretch your legs but at least you can't exert any lateral pressure on your knees because your calves and feet are nicely boxed in. Since the toilet lights are controlled by a random status generator, you have endless opportunities to wonder if "red" means someone is using the toilet or not. The same, of course, applies to "green".
Today the standard Air France delay is forty-five minutes for all planes; which means that I would have caught my connecting flight to Zurich since it adhered to the standard delay.
Unfortunately the Air France check-in lady in Chennai divined from her crystal ball, that I would not catch the regular Zurich flight and booked me on the later one.
The Frenchman at the CDG transit desk refused to rebook me on the earlier flight telling me that my luggage would not make it. I told him I didn't care and that Air France could deliver the luggage to my home. He refused that, too. I managed to enter the fast-track lane through security and successfully reached the gate for the earlier flight. There I was refused entry for security reasons because my luggage was on the other plane. I told the lady that thanks to Air France losing my luggage, I had been a security risk on the whole first leg of my trip. This didn't impress her.
What remains is a report on the lounge: the croissants are alright, but the "point informatique" is the only corner of the lounge where there is no WLAN reception.
Now the sun is shining down on the vehicles of the "bagages equipages", and I am getting mentally ready to fill out the next "missing luggage" form in Zurich.
Air France - Global Disaster in Progress: Episode V - A.W.O.L.
Let us continue our discussion with airline information systems: in Chennai, my Air France flight was labeled as "à l'heure / on-time" until the bitter end, first at 2:35 AM, then at 3:00 AM. Take-off was at 3:40 AM. "On-time / à l'heure" thus seems to be an Air France synonym for "sometime".
Here at CDG, my flight to Zurich is displayed everywhere as 1305 a l'heure. At 1230, at the gate I wanted to board but was told that the plane had two hours delay. There is no snow outside, only sunshine, so it can't be the weather. Back at the lounge, a friendly lady told me that they couldn't find a crew for the plane. Down at the gate they had told me "delayed incoming plane" - apparently the air traffic control had only realized the plane was missing as boarding was supposed to start
Thus I am again sitting in the lounge, contemplating what the Air France crew that is absent without leave might be doing on a sunny afternoon in Paris.
And the screen still says "1305 AF5104 Zurich à l'heure"
Heard that M will be conferred with the Legion d’honor (or whatever the French try to bribe people with!) in the this year’s Bastille day….provided he flies Air France to Paris!!! M politely refused the honour citing project commitment – after all 14th July is just one day after our go-live!!!
