My cockup, their conspiracy

It’s not easy being relatively chaotic if you’re trying to live an organised life.

That was confirmed on a recent trip to Germany. I couldn’t find a direct flight from Valencia, where I now live, to Frankfurt. That isn’t quite the same thing as saying that there is no such flight, only that if there is, I haven’t found it yet. So instead I decided to take the train to Madrid and fly from there.

The train service is remarkable. An hour and forty minutes for a trip that takes three to three-and-a-half hours by car. Far, far beyond anything being achieved in Britain, the nation that pioneered railway travel in Europe.

The other great thing about travelling via Madrid was that I could go up the evening before and have dinner with my sons, who live there, and my daughter-in-law and my daughter-out-law. Who live there too.

The plan was to travel at 4:15, to have drinks and dinner in the evening.

I bought the ticket on line. Sadly, I must have been thinking too hard about the flight because when I came to travel, I discovered that I’d booked myself onto a train for the same day as the flight – which would have meant missing the plane – and not for the evening before.

“Thinking too hard about the flight?” my son Nicky interjects. “You mean not thinking at all.”

Ah, well. His judgement is harsher but perhaps more accurate than mine. Which is a little kinder.

In any case, I decided there wasn’t really a problem. I’d taken a flexible ticket, perhaps unconsciously aware that I was screwing up, so I had only to go to the station early and change the reservation.

It wasn’t that simple. There wasn’t a 4:15 that day, so the first train I could get on was the 5:10. But then the ticket agent corrected himself.

“Sorry – no. That train’s fully booked. And – oh, dear – so’s the 7:15. The first I can get you on is the 8:15. The last seat.”

“OK,” I said, “but every train I’ve ever caught in Spain has no-shows. Could I wait by an earlier train and if, just before it’s due to leave, there’s a spare seat, grab it?”

He shrugged.

“If they let you onto the platform, you can try.”

That wasn’t going to happen. Renfe, the national railway operator in Spain, posts staff at the entrance to platforms to check tickets, and there was no way they were going to let me near a train I wasn’t booked on. I’m not sure how to say “more than my job’s worth” in Spanish, or whether there is any such expression in the language, but that was absolutely the attitude they were taking.

It seems that against me all fate had conspired. Or at least, all Renfe.

In the end I had to take the 8:15.

Renfe's high-speed AVE trains
Fast, efficient, comfortable. With flexible service? Not so much

Now I know that the cockup was entirely my fault. But I find there’s something attractive about company employees trying to help out even someone who’s created his problems himself. You know, the “let’s see if we can find a solution” attitude as opposed to the jobsworth mentality.

After all, what does it cost them?

They could have helped had they wanted to. You’ll remember that I’d been assigned the last available seat on the 8:15. And yet, when I got on, I found a dozen seats, just in my carriage and the next, which stayed empty for the whole trip. I’m sure there were empty seats on the 5:10 and the 7:15 too.

It’s funny. A French high-speed train once stopped at a station it wasn’t due to call at, just to help my wife Danielle by allowing her to leave it there. A friend of mine who got on the wrong high-speed train in Germany was allowed off at an abandoned station, and was picked up there by the next high-speed train – the one he should have been on – although the station had been out of use for years.

Ah, well. Not everyone has the same view of customer service.

At least the sons and the partners stood by me. They turned out to meet me, not at 6:00 as intended, but at 10:00, which in Spain is the traditional time for dinner anyway. So we ate well in a restaurant near the station. Their warmth and sympathy made me feel a lot less foolish and a lot less annoyed. In any case, hanging around at the station in Valencia for four hours had been less painful than might be imagined – Danielle stayed with me until she had to go and walk the dogs, and I did some work afterwards. A longer wait in the station than I’d planned, but not a waste of time.

Still. I’ve got to learn to overcome my chaotic inclinations and live the organised existence I crave. Especially in Spain, where Renfe conspires so majestically against such sad little cockup merchants as me.

Air travel can be so complex sometimes... Even when it seems simple

Please pay attention. This is a complex story. You need to focus.

Now, I readily admit that it doesn’t seem that complex at first glance. You might even be fooled into thinking it’s trivially simple. I know I was, but like you, I had to learn that I was sadly mistaken.

Over the last three days, I travelled from London to Vienna, then Vienna to Frankfurt, then Frankfurt to London. I know that doesn’t seem that complicated, but it really, really is.

I mean, what you’re supposed to do when you catch a plane is fly from point A to point B, do whatever you came to do, then travel from point B to point A. Even if there are intermediate stops in between, the basic principle holds. Out, then back.

A triangular trip? Way beyond the capacity of the airlines in our post-low cost age.

The first thing that went wrong is that I couldn’t check in on-line. So I turned up at the airport with nothing proving I was booked on the flight other than an e-mail from a booking system.

The second thing that went wrong was that the check-in machines inside the terminal wouldn’t check me in. A disdainful employee, aged about sixteen as far as I could see, came over to provide assistance. He clearly thought I looked about eighty.

“Let me see, sir, can I help at all?” he said, and you can just imagine the superior tone, can’t you? Underneath them is lurking the thought “poor old man, he doesn’t understand that you have to feed in your passport open, not closed.”

So he took my passport and fed it in, exactly as I had. “Your reference number, sir?” So I gave it to him and he typed it in, just as I had a few minutes earlier.

And then, just as I had, he stared, bemused, at the error message on the screen.

“You’d better go to a manned check-in desk, sir,” he advised, which at least had the merit of being exactly what I had intended to do.

The Austrian Airlines lady sorted me out, and off I went to Vienna.

Which is where the third thing went wrong. No suitcase greeted me on the carousel.

I went to see another Austrian Airlines lady.

“But,” she told me, “you are travelling to Frankfurt.”

“This is true,” I confirmed, “but not till tomorrow.”

“But your bag is in transfer, ready for the next leg of your trip.”

“Great. But what am I supposed to do during the day tomorrow? I have a meeting. My suit’s in the case.”

She considered this.

“Ah,” she said at last, “you are making a stay in Vienna.”

It was a relief that I had found someone with the necessary intellectual acuity to grasp the extent of my predicament.

She looked sorrowful, which didn’t calm my apprehension at all.

“We can get the bag brought round, but it could be a long time.”

It was getting on for 11:30 at night. I could picture myself stuck there till 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. But in the end it only took twenty minutes, and she came round to check everything was OK, so we exchanged smiles and I thanked her warmly.

The fourth thing that went wrong was the next day, when I came to check my bag in again for Frankfurt.

“But you have a bag in the system already,” the third Austrian Airlines lady told me.

I looked, I hope pointedly, at my bag which was undeniably right there, stolid and unmistakeable.

“Do you have another bag?”

I explained to her that I didn’t. She called a colleague over. He explained to her that she had to delete the existing record for a bag in the system and then register a new one. She tried, and failed when the system told her she couldn’t delete the entry. So he had a go, slightly condescendingly, intent on proving that with his expertise, he wouldn’t make the same mistake she had. Until he bumped up against the same error message. At which point he hightailed it out of there, ostensibly to take care of the next passenger. 

I was delighted to see that the “next passenger” turned out to be a group of nineteen Mandarin speakers on a Kung Fu world tour. Served him right, I felt.

Meanwhile, my young lady called a support person, who was on break. Eventually, she got back from break and assured us she’d be right over, which turned out to be ten minutes later.

“So you want this bag checked through to London?” she asked.

I stayed calm.

“No,” I explained in measured tones, “Frankfurt, please. Where I can collect it.”

I made a point of checking the luggage tag carefully, to ensure it really was marked ‘FRA’. It was.

The fifth thing that went wrong was at Frankfurt today. I was pointed at a machine to get the luggage tag for my case.

Looks straightforward. But, believe me, it isn’t

“Your suitcase is already checked in,” the machine told me.

But this was Lufthansa, and they take no nonsense from machinery.

The woman who dealt with my case – and I use the word in both senses – was a battleaxe with pink hair.

“Problem?” she said, “there is no problem.”

The bag got checked in and sent on its way. As was I. And at Heathrow there was my suitcase on the belt, waiting for me.

Now I just have to get it home and bring this terribly complex trip to what I hope will be a happy conclusion.