I’m sitting at Brisbane airport waiting for a delayed flight, and I thought it would be a great time to upload my best three photos from today. Ok there is free WiFi and it was simple enough to get connected BUT as I was trying to upload to flickr via the web interface, I came to realise that after 10 minutes I had uploaded less than 10% of the files (an estimate looking at the progress bar). There is a good chance that the whole thing will abort because the three files won’t upload before my flight is ready to load. Do I abort and try individually? … or some other anxiety inducing worry. No the first rule of travel is go with the flow. The free WiFi is slow, so I’ll just wait and see what happens. Nothing is really being lost if I wait till I get home.
So the answer to that wait, is the flickr upload ground to a halt. Time to stop worrying and perhaps have a coffee. Damn the flight is delayed further. Perhaps I’ll restart. …slowly slowly two of the three images get loaded over the next half hour wait. Now the incoming flight has arrived and passengers disembarking. The public service announcement indicates there is a problem and some passengers have to embark via the rear door and that means going out on the tarmac. It’s sure to be me, no big deal so I go to check my boarding pass on my phone (I’m just trying this for the first time).
Bugger the flight has closed off (and theoretically departed) so my boarding pass is no longer valid, and all I can see on my screen is I no longer have a boarding pass. So I join the queue of people with the same problem infront of a very stressed ground staff at the gate. After talking on her radio for a while, she says we’ll have to go to service desk. So the queue moves over there and eventually I get a printed boarding pass. The plane still is waiting to load and a massive queue is waiting to board but still to board via the air bridge and when the boarding actually starts only myself and two other guys walk over to the stairs to the tarmac, our boarding pass is checked and we stroll to the back of the plane. climb the portable stairs and get seated, everyone else is slowly getting through the air bridge crush and the the narrow corridor between the seats and other passengers arranging the luggage, it take a further 20 minutes to load everyone. Why weren’t they listening to all the announcements? Ah that’s right they where listen to their iPods, or watching video of their iPads or just talking on their phones, and probably their frequent flyer apps didn’t notify them because notify is turned off!
The morale of this story is perhaps we expect the always connected and on-line world to be there, work and look after our interests. However we shouldn’t stress when they don’t, just be prepared to go back to the old methods that work (ie Perhaps just wait to get home to upload, use a printed boarding pass, listen to the announcement)
PS: I was writing this as the events unfolded and I was able to update a draft of the text to blogger via my Open Live writer app, but it got hung up trying to upload the images I had capture on my phone & PC to Google Photos (low bandwidth issues same as flickr uploads mentioned above). So I had to be patient uploading this blog post as well.
I’m sitting at Brisbane airport waiting for a delayed flight, and I thought it would be a great time to upload my best three photos from today. Ok there is free WiFi and it was simple enough to get connected BUT as I was trying to upload to flickr via the web interface, I came to realise that after 10 minutes I had uploaded less than 10% of the files (an estimate looking at the progress bar). There is a good chance that the whole thing will abort because the three files won’t upload before my flight is ready to load. Do I abort and try individually? … or some other anxiety inducing worry. No the first rule of travel is go with the flow. The free WiFi is slow, so I’ll just wait and see what happens. Nothing is really being lost if I wait till I get home.
So the answer to that wait, is the flickr upload ground to a halt. Time to stop worrying and perhaps have a coffee. Damn the flight is delayed further. Perhaps I’ll restart. …slowly slowly two of the three images get loaded over the next half hour wait. Now the incoming flight has arrived and passengers disembarking. The public service announcement indicates there is a problem and some passengers have to embark via the rear door and that means going out on the tarmac. It’s sure to be me, no big deal so I go to check my boarding pass on my phone (I’m just trying this for the first time). 
Bugger the flight has closed off (and theoretically departed) so my boarding pass is no longer valid, and all I can see on my screen is I no longer have a boarding pass. So I join the queue of people with the same problem infront of a very stressed ground staff at the gate. After talking on her radio for a while, she says we’ll have to go to service desk. So the queue moves over there and eventually I get a printed boarding pass. The plane still is waiting to load and a massive queue is waiting to board but still to board via the air bridge and when the boarding actually starts only myself and two other guys walk over to the stairs to the tarmac, our boarding pass is checked and we stroll to the back of the plane. climb the portable stairs and get seated, everyone else is slowly getting through the air bridge crush and the the narrow corridor between the seats and other passengers arranging the luggage, it take a further 20 minutes to load everyone. Why weren’t they listening to all the announcements? Ah that’s right they where listen to their iPods, or watching video of their iPads or just talking on their phones, and probably their frequent flyer apps didn’t notify them because notify is turned off!
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