On Queuing, Security, Routing and Traveling after QCon 2008 London

Sitting a mere 200 km from home, 7 hours late by now and hopefully there at dawn, I’ll try to recapture the events of this day.
After the last day of the exciting QCon week ended on Friday, I used the time on Saturday morning to buy some family gifts in Covent Garden. Taking the Gatwick Express from Victoria, I arrived about one and half hour before my flight was scheduled to leave. Checking in at the check-in computer was no problem at all. The second step in the procedure was to proceed to the Fast Bag Drop. I looked around but could only see hundreds of people queuing at “Bag Drops” on both sides of the terminal hall. A staff of 6 was handling the large amounts of luggage the people wanted to drop quickly. So the obvious approach was to put all passengers of all departing flights together in a waiting queue and handle them with the same priority. Great idea. After waiting too long, there was a staff member yelling for passengers to Pisa. My flight was scheduled before the one to Pisa, it had about three quarters of a hour to liftoff. I asked her for assistance, she told me that the boarding for the BA flights is done a 3/4 hour before liftoff. Although she tried to phone her way through – no chance. So I had waited all the time in vain and missed my flight. I promised myself never to take any luggage except hand luggage on the next one-week trip.
I was directed to the ticket sales counter for assistance. As this was the only direct flight to Dresden for the day, I had to be rerouted. So she typed all the possible combinations she could think of into her terminal – is there no software for calculating routes? I suggested routing to Berlin and to travel home from there by train. As they don’t have internet access at the ticket counter, I was sent to the shopping area to look up the train connections myself. Unfortunately, the last train to Dresden leaves Berlin (capital city!) at 9 pm, thank you Deutsche Bahn.
The alternative routes were: getting from Gatwick to Heathrow and flying there directly to Berlin, arriving at 10:15 pm, or flying from Gatwick via Zurich to Berlin and arriving at 9:45 pm. As she didn’t want me to be queued again I was directed to a “special care” express counter. For the first time ever, my bagpack was not manageable by the luggage transport system (because of the straps). So I had to declare it as oversized luggage, which took only another fifteen minutes as the poor woman before me had some problems with the guy at the luggage counter.
Next was security. The usual taking cosmetics bottles from women stuff was even topped this time. After the regular security checks we’re all used to, there is an additional x-ray scan of your shoes at Gatwick. So all passengers took off their shoes to have them x-rayed. I don’t know what they expect to find in there except terrible smells. You could have taken everything from the shoes when crossing the distance between the two security checkpoints.
Just before boarding I called my wife who was desperately expecting my return as being ill and pregnant herself, she had to take care of our ill little daughter for the entire conference week. She told me that the public transport staff in Berlin was on strike. Fine.
The flight to Zurich had only a one-hour delay, so nothing special. The only funny thing was the woman next to me doing some brain exercise on her Nintendo DS and cursing all the time. Getting the boarding card in Zurich was also no problem. When walking to the Gate of the Lufthansa flight, a friendly gentleman redirected all people to another exit. “It’s shorter and nicer that way.” I was quite suspicious. The solution to that weird behaviour was that Swiss airports do security checks even on transit passengers. But no shoe scanning this time. And no one took my MacBook Air to be a “device”, as Michael Nygard had experienced in the US.
So arriving in Berlin, I took the fortunately still operating bus shuttle from Tegel Airport and managed to get via the cold and closed-down main station to the east-station where I’m now sitting at McDonalds(R) “McCafe(R)” waiting for my train to depart in about 3,5 hours time.

Update: The train from Berlin was half an hour late, this was some official rescheduling but neither the information screens nor the ticket machine knew of this. Another problem was the train having been in the station over night with heating switched off and doors open, so it was cooled down to a very low temperature and the heating could not catch up. This caused me to add another layer of clothing to be able to sleep within the train. When I arrived in Dresden it rained, no surprise there.

Lessons learned:
* arrive 3 hours before departure at the airport
* travel light with hand luggage only
* don’t expect airlines being able to understand queuing theory and staff capacity
* clean your shoes for security scan
* don’t trust Swiss when they speak of shortcuts
* forget about returning home on time when you’re needed most

Tags: qcon2008 british_airways