I understand the business of flying planes and getting people to where they want to go on time is difficult. That’s not hard to understand. However, it just seems like flying is a lot harder than it has to be. Reflecting on my hour plus wait in Amsterdam to have someone glance at my passport for 1 second, I don’t understand why they couldn’t have staffed that up to the expected volume of people coming through. The airport knows how many people need to go through, yet they don’t make adequate provisions to get them through in a timely fashion.
I’m writing this (in OneNote) from my gate at the airport in Munich. I was supposed to arrive home today at 3:48 after flying from Munich to Amsterdam to Minneapolis to home. However, when I arrived here at the wonderful time of 5:20 this morning, I did the eService check in only to find out there was a problem with my ticket, and I needed to see an attendant. It’s a good thing I did this quickly, because by the time I was done, there were 30-40 stacked up behind me in line with the same issue. There was a technical issue with my flight to Amsterdam and it had been cancelled. After several frustrated looks and questions to people on the phone in French (this was at the Air France desk), she was able to find me a flight home via Chicago. The good news is I have one less, but the bad news is I can’t pick up my daughters from day care like I really hoped to do.
My flight is leaving at 9, so I made my way to the gate after breakfast (can I just say I love croissants – I could seriously eat like 20 in a row). I went to my new terminal, got my boarding passes and headed towards the gate. I past through security quickly as there was no line. I made it upstairs to passport control and passed through quickly also. Then as I got close to my gate, there was another passport control stop. I felt like I had done this before, but couldn’t remember just when – oh yeah, 2 minutes ago. After making it through that, I got to go through security again. Good times.
My last full day in Munich (Thursday) was extremely productive from a work standpoint. Unfortunately, I was unable to go to the BMW museum as I had hoped because I had to deal with a work situation. I stayed at the hotel for dinner and had a drink with my colleague from Singapore later that night. I didn’t sleep at all last night – and I’m frankly stunned that I can hold my head up now. I’m really hoping to sleep a ton on the flight to Chicago.
The trip was really fruitful from a work standpoint, because I was able to sit with my regional counterparts in one room and hash everything out. However, it’s quite a cost in time, effort and hassle to make it all happen. If we could do the getting together without the travel headaches somehow, we’d really have something.
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