Computer failures – and annoying delays

After a week of lying on the beach, eating,drinking and sleeping  – my husband and I were happy enough to be heading home. There is a lot to do in the next couple of weeks and we felt suitably refreshed and ready to go.

We awoke to stong winds and torrential rain yesterday so that clinched it. We packed our bags and headed to the airport – looking forward to when we might be able to make another trip to paradise.

The queues at the airport alerted us that something was up.

British Airways’ “computers were down” . I don’t know what that meant in technical terms but it really caused disruption for us humans. All of the check-in process had to be done by hand. With pens and paper. And phone calls for each passenger to check what seats we should be in….. It took 4 hours to check all of the passengers onto our flight. Of course that meant we left late – and that also meant that we missed our connecting flight in London this morning and had a further 4 hour delay waiting for the next one.

Regular readers will know that I get cross about bad customer service. I started off feeling sorry for the staff dealing with this “crisis” yesterday until I realised that they did not seem to be doing any such thing. They were under attack of course – but a smile and an explanation would have gone a long way to settling people. Some information would have helped too. What did we get ? A photocopy of a letter from the Customer Services Manager ( handed out in the queue by someone who could have just passed on the message verbally) telling us that – wait for it – the computers were down. No kidding…

Now my husband had just read his annual book ( he only reads books on the beach) – the last Harry Potter book this time. He told me that the Dementers in the book could be overcome by positive thoughts – and encouraged me to overcome the dementers in the form of the uncommunicative staff and the irritating passengers right in front of me. One – a guy – who said that this always happened when he flew with British Airways and he had only made this trip with them in sufferance ( yeah right). The other was a lady who regaled anyone who would listen to tales about plane journeys she had been on that had gone wrong. And we were trapped. So I tried positive thinking – I really did – but even I ran out of positive thoughts.

One of the joys of being in the Caribbean is that everything is done in “Caribbean Time”. This really slows you down. Maybe that was why the BA staff at Grantley Adams Airport found it hard to step it up when they needed to.

Now I sound like a grumpy old “dementer” myself. Barbados is beautiful. We had a wonderful holiday.