Complaints from the 21st century


My plan to force my body clock onto US regional settings is half complete. I went to bed at 10:30, failed to sleep for a couple of hours, and then kept waking up either desperate for the toilet or horribly dehydrated. (I think I’m coming down with a cold, which doesn’t really help.) Reveille was at 3:15, and after a quick shower I kissed my wife goodbye and took a taxi to the airport.

Changi is a little grim at 5 in the morning. All those carpeted hallways make you feel like you’ve shrunk and you’re walking around inside a Cyclopean hotel with questionable design choices. Speaking of questionable choices, I bought a bottle of water for the plane, before remembering that you can’t take fluids through the security cordon. I decided to cheer myself up by having a foot massage. The foot massage machine was broken.

It’s wonderful being entitled, isn’t it? In other countries you’d be complaining about the cost or scarcity of 3am taxis, or rude security personnel, or cramped dirty airports, but the worst I can say about Changi is I don’t like the carpet and they haven’t kept all the (free) massage machines switched on. Luckily, I’ll have security at Sea-Tac at the other end to reacquaint myself with How The Other Half Live.

I don’t remember Delta’s planes being so comfortable; I had just enough leg room, even with my bag shoved under my seat. The food they served was palatable, and they had Wreck It Ralph on the in-flight entertainment system, which meant I got to enjoy silently weeping during the big finale. Exploding Mentos get me everytime, y’know? (There’s only two films that reliably get me welling up at the end – one is Wreck It Ralph and the other is a ludicrously painful Korean film about two boxers whose name currently escapes me.)

However, Delta are teasing me. They advertise that they have a new film with Jim Carrey and Steve Carrell in it, but it’s impossible to find in their in flight system. Even though that same system has a big banner when it turns on telling you about the film. This is a mixed blessing; it *might* be a good film, but it might also be Jim Carrey gurning and Steve Carrell being disappointing for 90 minutes. Maybe I’ll find out on the second leg of my journey whether it’s Dinner For Schmucks or Little Miss Sunshine.

Although I shouldn’t. Having had slim-to-no sleep, and as it’s swiftly approaching 10:30 at night in Seattle, I should be trying to nod off as soon as I sit down on the plane, and sleep the sleep of the dead until we touch down again. That way I’ve got a chance of surviving the brutality of a day of meetings in rooms deprived of natural light.

Or I could pound the supposedly unlimited free beers all the way across the Pacific, and have a spectacular start to my trip.

Does “spectacular” still mean “denied access to the US”? The wifi at Narita is lamentably slow and I can’t look up the definition.


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