British Airways provides delay and comic relief...

Now, as regular readers may know, I am not always the luckiest of persons when it comes to travelling and - true to form - I managed to run into problems yesterday when travelling from London Heathrow to Rotterdam...

Boarding all went fine - in fact, better than fine! It was smooth and quick and I was in my seat with minimum wait and absolutely no fuss. But, no sooner was the whole plane boarded when there was the first hint that all was not well.

"I'm afraid there is a problem with one of the emergency exits," said the Captain over the intercom, "and we need to have the engineers to come and have a look at it."

I was sitting next to one of the emergency exits but, when the two yellow coated engineers boarded, it was the exit on the other side of the plane that they examined. Cue some removing of panels, a modicum of fiddling and some muted discussion before the engineers departed and left the plane. Problem solved? Oh no!

"Unfortunately," said the Captain, a few minutes later. "The engineers haven't been able to resolve the problem and they've gone to find a manual."

Gone to find a manual??? I tried to feel reassured (hey, at least they had a manual!) but instead found my confidence in the engineers had decreased just a smidgen. Twenty minutes passed (it was clearly either a really big manual or just a long way away) and the engineering team again boarded the aircraft and set to work...

Now, to the uneducated and untrained eye, it appeared they did exactly the same again (pop the panel, fiddle around a bit, look confused, and then mutter at each other) but I'm sure that - since they'd spent twenty minutes consulting the manual - this was an optical engineering illusion. But, either way, it didn't help because within minutes they had tromped dejectedly off the plane again.

Another twenty minutes or so rolled by - passengers idly wondering by this point whether or not we were going to actually leave Heathrow today - when a third engineer arrived. This one looked altogether more senior, considerably more knowledgeable. With a level of ethos befitting his appearance, he popped the panel. He fiddled. He muttered. He tromped back down the aisle and left.

The flight was now over an hour late and there was still no news of when we would be getting on our way. Just as I began to fear that this might be a problem beyond the engineer's capability, the engineering team re-emerged and strode with some confidence down the aisle - surely, I thought, surely they have solved the problem at last. And then they started doing this...

That's right. They are sticking black tape across the exit and adding no exit signs. An hour of deliberating and consultation of manuals and senior engineers resulted in the - highly technical - solution of slapping on a bit of tape and some stickers. To be fair, they did have a fair old game getting the 'no exit' stickers in place (perhaps the manual wasn't very clear) and they even made sure to pop some black tape on the exit sign on the ceiling (in case, after this hour delay, there were still some people who weren't aware there was a problem with the emergency exit):

And thus, after ten minutes of careful sticking, we ended up like this:

But, at least we were ready to go...right? Wrong! Due to losing two emergency exits, we now had to engage in a sort of musical chairs (sans music) to shuffle passengers around the plane to make sure that their distribution was suitable for our reconfigured plane. This took another 15 minutes of deliberation and moving and hand luggage shifting but, finally we were ready to depart. Right? Right? No. Not right at all. You see, while they had masked one ceiling exit sign, they had forgotten to mask the other one:

Now, I noticed this just after they left but was I going to draw attention to it? No, I just took a photo. But, one of the reshuffled passengers unfortunately was unable to restrain themselves. They had to tell a stewardess. Why, Mr. Shuffled Passenger? Why would you do that? We were ready to go and you had to point out a missing piece of black tape that no one cared about at all! Well, whatever his rationale, it brought a halt to the proceedings as we then had to call the engineers back on board in order to place two 8cm pieces of black tape over the exit sign and delayed our departure that little bit more....

Still, at least we got there in the end. The passenger sitting next to me told me they'd had their flight cancelled twice on this route so I guess I should consider myself lucky that we only needed some cosmetic surgery in order to get on our way...

A glimpse into the future of Google...possibly.

The last two days, I've been attending a conference in which a range of professionals from different industries get together to discuss developing trends in the media industry and take a peek at where those trends might be leading us in the next decade...

One of the tasks everyone was given was to take a company (selected from a range of possibilities such as Kickstarter, Oculus, Amazon, etc. - but each company could only be used once) and write a short narrative that depicts a future for them ten years from now. We only had 10-15 minutes to write this so there wasn't much time, but I got Google and I thought it might be fun to type up what I wrote and share it here and maybe encourage people to write shorts visions of the future as they see if for a media company...

Technology companies are like sharks; should they stop moving then they die. Google was the biggest shark of them all in 2014 and they continually sought to evolve and grow; they never stopped moving and acquiring - whether people, concepts or companies - and, as 2024 dawns, we find Google still as the largest digital predator. Central to that has been the morphing, evolution, and amalgamation of their technologies into AESOP (Autonomous Embedded Search Optimisation Persona).

John is 35 and works as a lawyer; he single and interested in sports (particularly baseball - he supports the Red Sox) and music (he listens to blues rock) and he relies upon his AESOP for every part of his day. He is woken at 6am by his alarm, not because he set it but because AESOP knows that he has a 9am meeting and that, if he is to get ready and make it through the projected Boston traffic, this is how long he will need. AESOP also communicates to the cappuccino machine in the kitchen to begin brewing coffee while waiting for John to wake. Once John has staggered to the kitchen, AESOP activates a wall display to highlight interesting news stories, media, and events that is has been collating while John slept. It also has a list of suggested gifts that he might want to send to his sister for her birthday (based upon previous gifts he sent and limited communication with his sister's AESOP).

While John eats breakfast, AESOP brings up some suggested recipes for the dinner John is planning on cooking for a date this weekend; it doesn't require he give an auditory response since cameras monitor John's face for micro expressions using the facial action coding system, it can determine which of the recipes he likes most purely from this information. John showers, gets ready for work and then gets into his car - whose navigation is powered by AESOP - and this means that he can focus on work preparations while his car drives him. AESOP has been searching for case files that could aid him in strengthening the legal case he is currently defending and John reviews these, saving the best of these to the cloud for later evaluation. AESOP then lets John know that the star pitcher of the Red Sox is due to sign copies of his autobiography at a book store two blocks from his work, and gives him the opportunity to buy tickets since it fits into his current lunch break.

AESOP is an AI that learns who we are, what we want, how we feel, and helps satisfy demands we are sometimes not even aware of ourselves...