.. and more annoyingly, why I spend the night in Amsterdam, even though the Dutch PHP conference is not until next weekend. So there were apparently some pretty bad thunderstorms over France, Belgium and the Netherlands. As a result the plane that should take me to Amsterdam on the way to Sandjeford arrived about an hour late. Back in the day, when airlines still afforded themselves some ground time, this would not have been that big a deal, as I had no checked luggage and so ideally I could have switched planes in time as I had 1 hour stopover time in Amsterdam. Well these days it means that if the incoming plane comes one hour late, you will likely also be one hour late. Usually they can try to make up a few minutes by burning some more fuel. In this case the thunderstorms actually forced us to fly a non standard route, which took even longer.

Now when they broke the news in Zurich I, as well as many other passengers, "stormed" the counter to get information on our connection flights. The local staff from Zurich Airport and KLM insisted that we all fly to Amsterdam and that they will figure things out there. I did not feel so good about this, since I expected the selection of planes flying to Norway would be somewhat limited. Well I guess I should have indeed turn into an obnoxious passenger and forced the staff in Zurich to deal with my case.

It turns out that they booked me on the next flight to Sandjeford, since we landed at 20:35, 15 minutes after my original plane to Sandjeford had departed. Well the next plane was 15:00 the next day! So I would have made it to the conclusion round. This is what they told me at the first queue I had to wait that night, also known as the transfer information. They then said that there is a plane that would arrive around 9:00 in Oslo. But with the 3 hour train ride to Skien, I would have made it to Skien at around 14:00 realistically. So I would have missed over half the conference. I told the guy that I want to be flown back to Zurich immediately and that I expect a full refund for the entire trip. At any rate the guy there told me that I need to go to the ticket desk and that I should not expect a refund for the flight to Sandjeford, since they are providing me a flight, only 18 hours later than scheduled on my less than 48 hour trip.

So on to the next queue at the ticket counter. I guess I was kind of lucky, since I only had to wait a little bit over 30 mins. It seems KLM's policy is to have a single counter for both business class and economy with two queues. They always first empty the business class queue. Only if its empty they take economy passengers. Suffice it to say the business class queue was quite busy and filled up pretty much at the same rate at counters freed up. The poor soules that arrived 5 minutes after me, probably had to wait more than an hour.

Anyways at the ticket counter, we went through all the travel options once more, which I again declined since they all did not let me fulfill the purpose of my trip. So I was booked on the 9:55 flight to Zurich as I preferred to not take the 7:00 so that I can at least get some sleep so that I would not be grumpy all Saturday. Since it was KLM's fault for the original 1 hour delay, the lady at the counter told me that I would get a hotel voucher. Other passengers were not so lucky. If you miss your connection due to bad weather KLM only provides a little hygiene package but no hotel voucher.

Of course they couldn't just hand the voucher, so that around 22:00 I was queuing up at the baggage service counter. Actually the counter was closed due to technical difficulties, so us economy passangers were permitted into the nice business class office with designer chairs. Well of course we had to queue for about 30 minutes. After this waiting period I was handed a hotel voucher including dinner and breakfast. Next to me sat a guy who was told he would get a voucher at the ticket desk, but was turned down in the baggage service area. Not sure if he ever made it.

At around 23:00 I got on the hotel shuttle wondering what kind of hotel KLM had in store for me. On the bus ride I was chatting with other passengers. We were getting some cynic laughters out of this entire situation. Of course KLM was not too high on the "my favorite airlines" list on the bus. Actually both I and another passengers stressed that so far KLM has been one of the better airlines for us. Then again all airlines are probably the same. You are worth as much as you pay and thats just business, so it goes.

To our surprise the hotel was quite nice. As I was queuing up for the 4th and final time that night, I was hoping that I would at least get a decent meal before going to bed. I had actually worked in Geneva this week and unfortunately the train restaurant was closed on my 3 hour ride to Zurich, so I only had a sandwich I bought at the airport. There was only no meal on the flight to Amsterdam. To my dismay the kitchen was already closed, but at least they served up a sandwich with fruits. They even exchanged my cheese sandwich to something with meat since I do not eat cheese (its a taste thing, not religion).

So at midnight I was in my room, which features 70-ties style bedlinen, a TV with plenty of channels to choose from and a bath room with tub and separate shower. Wifi was unfortunately not included in the KLM voucher package and I decided that I did enough hacking for the day as I spend most of the time waiting at the Zurich airport hacking (where I should have been complaining instead).

After breakfast in the morning I took the hotel shuttle to Schipol airport again to take the 9:55 plane to Zurich. The airport itself is nice, but quite a lot of walking. Not a big deal. As I am typing this I am on the plane. They are offering those Doritos barbecue snacks again with the option of taking a single tiny chocolate cookie instead. Of and course we are also delayed for about 30 minutes due to technical difficulties. Given that my last 3 Air Berlin flights got me a total of 4 hours delay (plus another 1,5 hours due to a missed train from a 45 minute delay from the flight), I am beginning to adapt my algorithms for computing from what distance I switch from train to plane. Of course taking the train is also more environmental friendly. Then again the biggest problems with taking the plane is when you have a connecting flight, because this is the case where you get stuck in a place you never wanted to be (neither your destination nor your home) and for these types of flights the train is rarely an option.

It's truly a pity I missed Vikinger. I wanted to talk about so many things with people, like PHP internal infrastructure for code development, bug tracking and release management. Someone was looking for some hints on PHP6 migration issues, which I could have done a good job at answering based on my recent MySQL UC talk on exactly this topic. JSR-170 was also been on my list. If time would permit a quick chat with Sebastian and Kore about workflow visualization would have rounded things off along with the all important socializing with old friends like Jani and Derick.

Next week I will be flying to Amsterdam again via KLM. Let's see how things will go then.

Ugh, that sounds awful. I don't fly much, and so far I've not had a bad experience like that, thankfully.