Saturday Evening
Schiphol airport is wired for the Intranet and a lot of people were logged in via their laptops, exploring the travel sites and looking for alternatives. I wasn’t though. For reasons I still haven’t determined, my normally trusty Dell refused to let me play. Apparently I was connected, and with excellent signal strength, but no matter which site I tried (and boy, did I try plenty), I couldn’t get the page to display.
So, in order to rearrange my travel plans, and coordinate them with my family who had expected to pick me up at Glasgow airport some 5 hours ago, I had to resort to 20th Century technology, namely, the telephone. My cell phone is somewhat primitive, barely one step above 2 tin cans and a string and one of my new year's resolutions is to upgrade to a real one. Or at least one that can operate outside the USA. To the payphones then. Oh, I knew this was going to be fun.
Remember what I said about how calm I’d been all day? It didn’t last.
Me and payphones have never got on and these ones seemed to have been sent from hell for the sole purpose of vexing me. If something could go wrong, it did. First there’s the problem that all our business travel has to be booked via the Corporate Travel web site. Kind of a challenge when you can’t access the Internet. Not only that, but the contact phone numbers I had only worked from the USA. My wife and I had several conversations over the next couple of hours, while she tried to help remotely, but not being able to access the company’s network, there wasn’t too much she could do.
She did her best though and the last conversation we had was when I asked her to contact American Express to see why the phone operator was telling me there was a block on the card. There hadn’t been when I began making these calls, but there was now – I could no longer use it on the payphone, and if the phone operator was correct, the next few days were going to be very uncomfortable. I had my personal debit card with me, and while it was gamely racking up transatlantic charges on the payphones, my bank account wasn’t going to hold up for long if it had to cover all my expenses ‘till I got home.
At around 8pm, I came to the reluctant conclusion that I’d achieved all I could via the telephone. “all I could” being of course “absolutely nothing.”
What next? Well, Schiphol Airport is also home to a railway station. And while planes may not be leaving for the next few days, there was a chance that trains might be. I decided to go and ask.
Of course, I couldn’t just “go and ask”. That would have been too easy. Instead I had to stand in yet another line, for yet another 2 hours just to pose the question. Although technically, I did abscond from the line for about 10 minutes, leaving my bags in the care of a very nice Australian lady whom I had befriended. This was to answer a page from my wife so she could tell me she’d been able to speak to American Express who had confirmed that my card was in order, and there was no reason for it not to work in the payphones. So that was one bit of positive news. Even better, when I was finally able to pose my question as to the availability of a train, I received an answer in the affirmative. Yes, there was a train, leaving tomorrow and it would take me all the way to London. But uh no, sorry they didn’t take American Express. My poor debit card hasn’t worked so hard in its life.
So there we are. After being at the airport for 15 hours, I now had a plan to leave. By train.
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