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So I've got mahself a new LJ. It's pink. Like my soul. *angst*
....wait...
Well, that was redundant. And the colour scheme is still kind of weird for various reasons related to my laziness. In any case, I have heard that one of the main purposes of LiveJournal is adolescent ranting in the extreme, so I've just leapt at the opportunity to describe a recent disappointment. And so, an essay. Enjoy.
How Not To Go On Holiday
So my family (minus my brother, who's working as a drug courier in Thailand. Lucky bastard) attempted to go to Spain for a long weekend. This was with the completely innocent motive of attending the wedding of a very nice Spanish girl called Theresa to a Spanish man called Javi (technically Theresa's name is Maria Theresa, because the local man of God in her birthplace was slightly nuts and refused to baptise any child unless they were named Maria or Jesus). It was the most simple of simple plans:
1. Buy junk, pack bags, other prepatory stuff
2. Travel to some place near London and crash for the night.
3. Catch plane from Stansted Airport, arrive in Spain, do other stuff.
Phase 3 would be in more detail (in fact, I could probably have kept going until maybe Phase 10 or 11) if not for the fact that it was never completed. Such is my sad story.
Phase 1
Most people, I cannot help but assume, take a somewhat relaxed attitude to going on holiday because that's the whole point of going in the first place. Not so for my mother, who with great gusto will turn even the most uncomplicated of arrangements into a military manouvre. Considering that none of us wanted to go that much in the first place but were doing it anyway because that's the polite thing to do, she managed to make it all extremely stressful and slightly unpleasant for all parties involved (myself, my father and to a lesser extent, any customer service droids who managed to get in her way). She also pounced on the opportunity to force me into various vile over-girly clothes and makeup which in any other situation I would happily burn and dance upon, being of the belief that I have some sort of internal vat of oestrogen that is just waiting to burst out of wherever it's been hiding all my life. On the plus side, I also got some fairly nice clothes out of the deal because that's how bribery works.
As regards the home we left behind, our main concern was the fish - we have a tank full of tropical fish that bubbles happily away in the kitchen (that is to say, the tank bubbles. The fish just kind of swim around looking mellow). Why the fish? Because on the last holiday we embarked upon, we left some friend of my father's to care for the fish. We left behind a tub and a half of fish food (which comprises almost completely of 'fish and fish derivatives' which bothers me a little - how can you derive anything from fish except fish? - but the fish don't know any better, I guess). Now, as any responsible fish owner would know, fish need a couple of pinches of their compressed dead brethren per day. Over two weeks, this would be maybe half a tub's worth, or less. So of course, this psychopathic friend - having previously assured us that she knew exactly what to do - dumped the entire 1.5 tubs into the tank. When we returned, the water was orange. Opaque and orange. Like soup. We thought she'd lost it halfway through,poured the whole tank into a food blender and pressed 'puree'. Miraculously, the fish had survived but they were much, much bigger. We had to put them into the pond outside where they were promptly eaten by birds. The circle of life moves on.
I digress. This time, we left the slightly nuts but generally benevolent evangelical family next door to care for the menagerie. They have dogs, rats, cats and approximately 7 children so it wouldn't be a problem. (why approximately? Because their kids all look the same minus their two daughters, so they're difficult to keep track of. The size of their brood can be anything between three and nine at any one time, and as best I can tell their mother is pregnant about six months after giving delivery to a baby girl. I have no idea where they're keeping them all.)
Phase 2
Driving from my hometown to just-above-London can take upwards of five hours. It took us two and a half, which was an absolute blessing. If the whole thing had gone smoothly as the drive down had, right now I'd be getting shitfaced in a wedding reception at a Spanish hotel with a free bar. Actually, wait, they're two hours ahead of us. So I'd be slumped in the Ladies', regurgitating violently into the toilet bowl. Which I'm sure is a mental image you all appreciate.
So we crashed in a Travel Inn for the night. For the unitiated, Travel Inn is a soulless, insidious chain of motel...things dedicated to providing uncomfortable, cramped rooms at not-quite-bargain prices. Because of these not-quite-bargain prices, all three of us shared a 'family room' and my mother claimed that I was some ridiculously small age, resulting in my having to sneak in like a ninja while the night receptionist's back was turned.
The 'family room', by the by, is apparently the 'nuclear family room'. That is, one stupidly bouncy double bed for Mummy and Daddy and two extremely short beds with all the comfort and density of gravestones for two little kids who put 'serious lumbar problems' on their Christmas list. My mother claimed the double bed as her territory almost immediately, leaving her husband and daughter with the gravestones because she's nice that way. There was also a Gideon's Bible, leading to the following exchange:
Mother: Naomi, read the Bible for some spiritual insight.
Naomi: *shrugs and grabs Bible, immediately flips it open to Ezekiel 23* 'And she lusted for men whose appendages were those of horses, and whose emissions were that of donkeys - '
Mother: ...alright, put that filth back, we sleep now.
And sleep we did. Rather, they did. Both my parents snore. And by snore I don't mean 'slightly troubled breathing', I mean 'imitating the death rattles of large land mammals'. So I was lying there on my marble slab for what seemed like forever and a half, listening to them provide conjecture as to what the Apocalypse might sound like. Oh, and at some ungodly hour, a couple (one man and one person of uncertain gender but probably a woman) crashed into the room next to ours and had a bit of...fun. My mother and father managed to continue slaughtering the animal kingdom throughout this. I did not tell them about it in the morning because they would a) be uncomfortable with the idea that their baby daughter was listening to two people fucking or b) not believe me.
Woke up, showered (Travel Inns have showers that require the skills of a professional safebreaker to switch on and then get to the right temperature. Oh, and no hairdryers), had breakfast in a supermarket cafe on the grounds that Travel Hell practically wanted your soul for the crap they were selling and we were off to Stansted Airport.
Phase 3
Stansted Airport is a relatively small affair about half an hour out of London and is largely used by British Airways and two budget airlines named EasyJet and RyanAir. We were flying with RyanAir and our flight was intended to leave at 11.10 AM. The rule was that we had to be at check-in by 10:30 and signs reading that the flight would happily leave without us were pasted all over the everywhere of the airport.
Because of my mother's military efficiency, we arrived at 9:30 and joined the end of a queue which seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon. The day we rolled in was the busiest in the history of the airport. Period. And it's a fairly old airport. We were also in the busiest slot of said busiest day - lasting between about 8am and 10am. It was nuts. At about 10:50, we were checked in, had our bags swallowed by the machine and got our booking passes. My father, with boundless optimism, claimed that we would be fine.
And then security. Oh, security.
Earlier in the day, two flights to the Middle East had left the airport. Because of this, there was a massive security backlog - of course, anyone who praises Allah must be carrying a bag of anthrax under his coat. And as a result, the queue for the security check was another horizon job. A few people who we would later learn were on our flight shoved through to the front and, because we're British, we allowed this to happen without question.
I would like to point out at this stage I noticed a computer screen that quietly marked up our flight as taking its final boarders. I pointed it out to my parents and either they misheard me or neither of them paid any attention. I did not bring it up afterwards because they would have claimed I never said it - and they had enough to argue about without dragging me into it. Tsh. Adults.
11.10 came and went. My father, with what would reveal itself as baffling stupidity, claimed that because we had boarding passes, the plane Would Not Leave Without Us. Despite the previously mentioned posters pasted over everything pointing out it would. At roughly 11.20 we got through security (my dad was frisked by a hot guy and I was slightly jealous at not being frisked at all) and pretty much ran to the Destination Lounge. This did not help much because we were separated from said Lounge by an extremely lengthy distance and several crowded escalators.
We arrived at our gate at 11.30. I sat in the waiting area and quietly watched our plane taxi towards the airstrip while my parents had a muted argument with a receptionist on another gate. For some reason it came to them as a surprise that the plane had left without us.
Here's the stupid part. The check-in/security area and the Destination Lounge are essentially different buildings. Apparently, several messages of the 'Would the Potter family please shift their asses onto their flight RIGHT NOW' variety were played on the PA system of the Destination Lounge, but not the check-in area, which is where we got held up. It's also where we would have been if we were just procrastinating and going around the stores or whatever. For some utterly stupid reason that was never fully explained, EasyJet can play messages over the check-in area, but RyanAir can't.
So we'd missed our flight. We tramped back to the check-in area and were forced to explain our dilemma in brief to several employees along the way so we could backtrack through security. Interestingly, every single RyanAir person we came across completely divorced themselves from the uniform they were wearing. It was never 'I apologise on behalf of the company' but 'Christ, I'm sorry, that sucks. I agree, RyanAir is awful, I just work for them'. Also, when we went back through security the queues had vanished. Seriously. The people going through did not have to wait at all. It would have been funny if it wasn't so tragic.
And then to the laughingly-named Customer Service desk. My mother had already elected herself as being the one to talk because, well, if my father was an X-Man, his power would be to loudly defend consumer rights (he genuinely claims it would be the power to control concrete posts telepathically, but never mind that). Suffice to say that when he gets in gear, it's a bit scary. So off my mum went to fight it out with a company representative whose native language was not English. And what English she did speak was nowhere near extensive enough to understand that we had been somewhat screwed over by the fact that a) we had not been adequately warned that we were going to miss our flight and more importantly b) RyanAir had not provided nearly enough staff to deal with the rush despite knowing it was going to be busier than ever.
Although she didn't go so far as to say it, RyanAir Girl seemed to think we'd brought it upon ourselves (which to a certain extent, we had, although their extent of the blame was greater than ours) through idle procrastination, because every other passenger had managed to make the flight which, incidentally, ended up leaving at 11.20. The next flight was on Sunday, meaning we would have missed the wedding altogether even if we did want to hang around for another two days. And the end result of this adventure?
No compensation. At all. Not a penny. The cheap fuckers wouldn't even refund our return flight. My mother did the maths and approximated that the costs of this outing - flights, car fuel, hotels, food, clothes for the wedding and the Spanish climate, other minor expenses - came to just over £1000 that has been completely wasted.
As an aside, this provided an interesting insight as to how my parents deal with crisis. My father threatened to create a placard damning RyanAir and start marching around their ticket booth, while my mother started popping Valium and quietly blaming my father. (Dad blamed what can best be described as The Man, which I suppose was as appropriate a scapegoat as anything else)
Our last minor obstacle was the fact that we had to call Spain and tell Theresa that we could not come. No fewer than six phone numbers were provided, all of which leading to people who did not speak any English whatsoever. Between the three of us, we speak perhaps ten words of Spanish and none of them were very useful. Despite my father's adoption of Tourist's English - speaking very loudly and very slowly in case this will miraculously make you understandable - it was a dead loss. As it happened, Theresa phoned us back twenty minutes later, explaining how angry she was at this injustice in English that has degraded into a linguistic mush since we first knew her.
And so we went home. Another relatively painless car journey. Mad Christians were slightly bemused by our return less than 24 hours after our departure and who can blame them.
Conclusions Drawn
1) Don't fly with RyanAir. Ever. Bastards.
2) Never fly at the very beginning of the school summer holidays (seriously, how did we fail to recognise that the airport would be stuffed to the gills? We must be retarded)
3) Any informative sign in an airport is gospel. Believe it or it will be your downfall.
4) However early you turn up to anything, it will not be early enough. This is the same as the law which dictates that if you're in a queue, the queue next to yours will be moving along faster. (this is, of course, unless you're in the faster queue, in which case the law never occurs to you)
5) Any Travel Inn is roughly analogous to Hell.
I'm going to Barcelona in November. Hopefully my school can coordinate it all slightly better than my parents can.
Love,
Naomi
....wait...
Well, that was redundant. And the colour scheme is still kind of weird for various reasons related to my laziness. In any case, I have heard that one of the main purposes of LiveJournal is adolescent ranting in the extreme, so I've just leapt at the opportunity to describe a recent disappointment. And so, an essay. Enjoy.
How Not To Go On Holiday
So my family (minus my brother, who's working as a drug courier in Thailand. Lucky bastard) attempted to go to Spain for a long weekend. This was with the completely innocent motive of attending the wedding of a very nice Spanish girl called Theresa to a Spanish man called Javi (technically Theresa's name is Maria Theresa, because the local man of God in her birthplace was slightly nuts and refused to baptise any child unless they were named Maria or Jesus). It was the most simple of simple plans:
1. Buy junk, pack bags, other prepatory stuff
2. Travel to some place near London and crash for the night.
3. Catch plane from Stansted Airport, arrive in Spain, do other stuff.
Phase 3 would be in more detail (in fact, I could probably have kept going until maybe Phase 10 or 11) if not for the fact that it was never completed. Such is my sad story.
Phase 1
Most people, I cannot help but assume, take a somewhat relaxed attitude to going on holiday because that's the whole point of going in the first place. Not so for my mother, who with great gusto will turn even the most uncomplicated of arrangements into a military manouvre. Considering that none of us wanted to go that much in the first place but were doing it anyway because that's the polite thing to do, she managed to make it all extremely stressful and slightly unpleasant for all parties involved (myself, my father and to a lesser extent, any customer service droids who managed to get in her way). She also pounced on the opportunity to force me into various vile over-girly clothes and makeup which in any other situation I would happily burn and dance upon, being of the belief that I have some sort of internal vat of oestrogen that is just waiting to burst out of wherever it's been hiding all my life. On the plus side, I also got some fairly nice clothes out of the deal because that's how bribery works.
As regards the home we left behind, our main concern was the fish - we have a tank full of tropical fish that bubbles happily away in the kitchen (that is to say, the tank bubbles. The fish just kind of swim around looking mellow). Why the fish? Because on the last holiday we embarked upon, we left some friend of my father's to care for the fish. We left behind a tub and a half of fish food (which comprises almost completely of 'fish and fish derivatives' which bothers me a little - how can you derive anything from fish except fish? - but the fish don't know any better, I guess). Now, as any responsible fish owner would know, fish need a couple of pinches of their compressed dead brethren per day. Over two weeks, this would be maybe half a tub's worth, or less. So of course, this psychopathic friend - having previously assured us that she knew exactly what to do - dumped the entire 1.5 tubs into the tank. When we returned, the water was orange. Opaque and orange. Like soup. We thought she'd lost it halfway through,poured the whole tank into a food blender and pressed 'puree'. Miraculously, the fish had survived but they were much, much bigger. We had to put them into the pond outside where they were promptly eaten by birds. The circle of life moves on.
I digress. This time, we left the slightly nuts but generally benevolent evangelical family next door to care for the menagerie. They have dogs, rats, cats and approximately 7 children so it wouldn't be a problem. (why approximately? Because their kids all look the same minus their two daughters, so they're difficult to keep track of. The size of their brood can be anything between three and nine at any one time, and as best I can tell their mother is pregnant about six months after giving delivery to a baby girl. I have no idea where they're keeping them all.)
Phase 2
Driving from my hometown to just-above-London can take upwards of five hours. It took us two and a half, which was an absolute blessing. If the whole thing had gone smoothly as the drive down had, right now I'd be getting shitfaced in a wedding reception at a Spanish hotel with a free bar. Actually, wait, they're two hours ahead of us. So I'd be slumped in the Ladies', regurgitating violently into the toilet bowl. Which I'm sure is a mental image you all appreciate.
So we crashed in a Travel Inn for the night. For the unitiated, Travel Inn is a soulless, insidious chain of motel...things dedicated to providing uncomfortable, cramped rooms at not-quite-bargain prices. Because of these not-quite-bargain prices, all three of us shared a 'family room' and my mother claimed that I was some ridiculously small age, resulting in my having to sneak in like a ninja while the night receptionist's back was turned.
The 'family room', by the by, is apparently the 'nuclear family room'. That is, one stupidly bouncy double bed for Mummy and Daddy and two extremely short beds with all the comfort and density of gravestones for two little kids who put 'serious lumbar problems' on their Christmas list. My mother claimed the double bed as her territory almost immediately, leaving her husband and daughter with the gravestones because she's nice that way. There was also a Gideon's Bible, leading to the following exchange:
Mother: Naomi, read the Bible for some spiritual insight.
Naomi: *shrugs and grabs Bible, immediately flips it open to Ezekiel 23* 'And she lusted for men whose appendages were those of horses, and whose emissions were that of donkeys - '
Mother: ...alright, put that filth back, we sleep now.
And sleep we did. Rather, they did. Both my parents snore. And by snore I don't mean 'slightly troubled breathing', I mean 'imitating the death rattles of large land mammals'. So I was lying there on my marble slab for what seemed like forever and a half, listening to them provide conjecture as to what the Apocalypse might sound like. Oh, and at some ungodly hour, a couple (one man and one person of uncertain gender but probably a woman) crashed into the room next to ours and had a bit of...fun. My mother and father managed to continue slaughtering the animal kingdom throughout this. I did not tell them about it in the morning because they would a) be uncomfortable with the idea that their baby daughter was listening to two people fucking or b) not believe me.
Woke up, showered (Travel Inns have showers that require the skills of a professional safebreaker to switch on and then get to the right temperature. Oh, and no hairdryers), had breakfast in a supermarket cafe on the grounds that Travel Hell practically wanted your soul for the crap they were selling and we were off to Stansted Airport.
Phase 3
Stansted Airport is a relatively small affair about half an hour out of London and is largely used by British Airways and two budget airlines named EasyJet and RyanAir. We were flying with RyanAir and our flight was intended to leave at 11.10 AM. The rule was that we had to be at check-in by 10:30 and signs reading that the flight would happily leave without us were pasted all over the everywhere of the airport.
Because of my mother's military efficiency, we arrived at 9:30 and joined the end of a queue which seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon. The day we rolled in was the busiest in the history of the airport. Period. And it's a fairly old airport. We were also in the busiest slot of said busiest day - lasting between about 8am and 10am. It was nuts. At about 10:50, we were checked in, had our bags swallowed by the machine and got our booking passes. My father, with boundless optimism, claimed that we would be fine.
And then security. Oh, security.
Earlier in the day, two flights to the Middle East had left the airport. Because of this, there was a massive security backlog - of course, anyone who praises Allah must be carrying a bag of anthrax under his coat. And as a result, the queue for the security check was another horizon job. A few people who we would later learn were on our flight shoved through to the front and, because we're British, we allowed this to happen without question.
I would like to point out at this stage I noticed a computer screen that quietly marked up our flight as taking its final boarders. I pointed it out to my parents and either they misheard me or neither of them paid any attention. I did not bring it up afterwards because they would have claimed I never said it - and they had enough to argue about without dragging me into it. Tsh. Adults.
11.10 came and went. My father, with what would reveal itself as baffling stupidity, claimed that because we had boarding passes, the plane Would Not Leave Without Us. Despite the previously mentioned posters pasted over everything pointing out it would. At roughly 11.20 we got through security (my dad was frisked by a hot guy and I was slightly jealous at not being frisked at all) and pretty much ran to the Destination Lounge. This did not help much because we were separated from said Lounge by an extremely lengthy distance and several crowded escalators.
We arrived at our gate at 11.30. I sat in the waiting area and quietly watched our plane taxi towards the airstrip while my parents had a muted argument with a receptionist on another gate. For some reason it came to them as a surprise that the plane had left without us.
Here's the stupid part. The check-in/security area and the Destination Lounge are essentially different buildings. Apparently, several messages of the 'Would the Potter family please shift their asses onto their flight RIGHT NOW' variety were played on the PA system of the Destination Lounge, but not the check-in area, which is where we got held up. It's also where we would have been if we were just procrastinating and going around the stores or whatever. For some utterly stupid reason that was never fully explained, EasyJet can play messages over the check-in area, but RyanAir can't.
So we'd missed our flight. We tramped back to the check-in area and were forced to explain our dilemma in brief to several employees along the way so we could backtrack through security. Interestingly, every single RyanAir person we came across completely divorced themselves from the uniform they were wearing. It was never 'I apologise on behalf of the company' but 'Christ, I'm sorry, that sucks. I agree, RyanAir is awful, I just work for them'. Also, when we went back through security the queues had vanished. Seriously. The people going through did not have to wait at all. It would have been funny if it wasn't so tragic.
And then to the laughingly-named Customer Service desk. My mother had already elected herself as being the one to talk because, well, if my father was an X-Man, his power would be to loudly defend consumer rights (he genuinely claims it would be the power to control concrete posts telepathically, but never mind that). Suffice to say that when he gets in gear, it's a bit scary. So off my mum went to fight it out with a company representative whose native language was not English. And what English she did speak was nowhere near extensive enough to understand that we had been somewhat screwed over by the fact that a) we had not been adequately warned that we were going to miss our flight and more importantly b) RyanAir had not provided nearly enough staff to deal with the rush despite knowing it was going to be busier than ever.
Although she didn't go so far as to say it, RyanAir Girl seemed to think we'd brought it upon ourselves (which to a certain extent, we had, although their extent of the blame was greater than ours) through idle procrastination, because every other passenger had managed to make the flight which, incidentally, ended up leaving at 11.20. The next flight was on Sunday, meaning we would have missed the wedding altogether even if we did want to hang around for another two days. And the end result of this adventure?
No compensation. At all. Not a penny. The cheap fuckers wouldn't even refund our return flight. My mother did the maths and approximated that the costs of this outing - flights, car fuel, hotels, food, clothes for the wedding and the Spanish climate, other minor expenses - came to just over £1000 that has been completely wasted.
As an aside, this provided an interesting insight as to how my parents deal with crisis. My father threatened to create a placard damning RyanAir and start marching around their ticket booth, while my mother started popping Valium and quietly blaming my father. (Dad blamed what can best be described as The Man, which I suppose was as appropriate a scapegoat as anything else)
Our last minor obstacle was the fact that we had to call Spain and tell Theresa that we could not come. No fewer than six phone numbers were provided, all of which leading to people who did not speak any English whatsoever. Between the three of us, we speak perhaps ten words of Spanish and none of them were very useful. Despite my father's adoption of Tourist's English - speaking very loudly and very slowly in case this will miraculously make you understandable - it was a dead loss. As it happened, Theresa phoned us back twenty minutes later, explaining how angry she was at this injustice in English that has degraded into a linguistic mush since we first knew her.
And so we went home. Another relatively painless car journey. Mad Christians were slightly bemused by our return less than 24 hours after our departure and who can blame them.
Conclusions Drawn
1) Don't fly with RyanAir. Ever. Bastards.
2) Never fly at the very beginning of the school summer holidays (seriously, how did we fail to recognise that the airport would be stuffed to the gills? We must be retarded)
3) Any informative sign in an airport is gospel. Believe it or it will be your downfall.
4) However early you turn up to anything, it will not be early enough. This is the same as the law which dictates that if you're in a queue, the queue next to yours will be moving along faster. (this is, of course, unless you're in the faster queue, in which case the law never occurs to you)
5) Any Travel Inn is roughly analogous to Hell.
I'm going to Barcelona in November. Hopefully my school can coordinate it all slightly better than my parents can.
Love,
Naomi
Current Mood: 
tired
tiredCurrent Music: Tom Jones & BNL - Little Green Bag
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