Never Trust a Plane that still has a Propeller

I was supposed to fly out to Copenhagen to give a session tomorrow as part of the Windows Embedded European tour. I had all my slides with the snazzy tour template, and a bag packed with hardware to show off.

Instead I went to an airport, sat in a plane for forty minutes, had a drink of orange juice, got out of the plane, queued for an hour, found out there was no way I could get to Copenhagen in time and went home.

We had all watched the plane land, and then were told that "For safety reasons" it was not able to take off again. I reckon the people that we saw arrive in it had a lucky escape.

Such is life I suppose. I tried to be relaxed about it. The only time I got a bit cross was when I was at the desk after an hour wait and the lady there was trying to sort out my travel plans. Having determined that there were no seats on any flights out today, and that a flight tomorrow would have me arrive far too late for my session, I said that in that case there was no point in me going. "So" she said, "You are choosing not to take up our offer of an alternative flight?". I made the point that it was not a matter of choice, if I couldn't get there today there was no reason to travel. "OK." she replied "I'll put on the file that you have decided not to take up our offer". I was too tired to put up much of a fight, and anyway a prominent notice reminded me that anyone who got too shirty would have the full might of KLM to deal with. Assuming they could actually get here of course, what with their transportation technology being so ropey.

I'm very sorry that I didn't make it out to Denmark. I was looking forward to meeting up with the students and seeing some cool Lego tech. Perhaps another time.

Comments

[Jacob]

What a shame! I had really looked forward to your presentation (in fact it was one of the main factors for me signing up, as I'm mostly interested in XNA development), but Dave Baker did a great job explaining the .NET Micro framework in your place and he also plugged your Micro framework book ;)

[Rob]

Thanks for that. I knew that Dave would do a good job. As for the blog alerter, I've just finished an article about how to make one that should find its way onto Coding4Fun before Christmas....

[Paul]

Damn the airliner company/airport, you should have been given a full refund and an apology maybe even a complementary flight.

Crappy service huh :(

[Caroline Phillips]

Rob we obviously missed you and all of your enthusiasm and next time we'll avoid booking a certain airline :)