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...
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