A TRAVEL EXPERIENCE RE-VISITED

GHOULISH AIR

You know which one I’m talking about; the green airline with the stale jokes even fifth graders find humorless.  Flight MN 452 from Lanseria Airport to Cape Town at 18:45 on 4 March 2010, booked early December 2009.  It’s Thursday, 10:40 AM.  I’m at the dentist.  My cell phone beeps.  ‘Honey, I’m at the hair salon, Ghoulish just sent SMS, our flight only leaves at 21:45, can you please check it out.’ I translate the message: Sort it out!  I’m upset. Call Ghoulish Air.  Have you ever listened to the crap on their answering service?  Twelve &^%$ minutes listening to how important my call is!  Yeah right.  Dentist’s calls me in.  For an hour I run through the options: my daughter would meet us in Cape Town as she is flying in from Bloemfontein.  Everything was coordinated: she would arrive 20 minutes after us, by which time we would have fetched the rental to drive to Granny’s in Somerset West to celebrate her 70th birthday.

Plan B: Granny will pick Leandra up arriving from Bloem, as the rest of us will then follow in the rental, hopefully, only 3 hours later.  Ghoulish Air had 3 other flights scheduled to leave from Lanseria Airport for Cape Town, however, they were all cancelled.  Arrived at Lanseria, having made peace (sort of) with the fact.  Scrawny youngster behind the check-in counter calls “ne -eext”.  The five of us (Moi, wife, son, daughter – no, not the one from Bloem, she’s already at Grandma’s – and son-in-law to be, pick up our carry-on luggage and the one item (golf set) which will go into the hold.  Scrawny wants to know if we are all traveling together.  As I open my mouth, my wife hits me in the ribs and all Scrawny hears is “UUGHG” followed by my daughter’s voice “yes we are”. “Right, then I will need five drivers’ licenses or five I.D. documents”, Scrawny announces.  Still nursing my ribs, I decide to be nice: “what caused this delay?”  Scrawny stops typing, sits back and with a superior and smug smile informs us: “its called rotation” He waits for the next question, which my wife supplies.  “It means, if an aircraft leaves Cape Town 15 minutes late, it doesn’t mean it arrives only 15 minutes late – it means it arrives 15 + 15 minutes late which is 30 minutes.  It then has a snowball effect and all flights are rotated.”  Scrawny returns to his key board, happy that he could explain something so simple and obvious to the stupid people facing him.  My right lung is punctured as four of my ribs, followed by my wife’s elbow penetrate them with the force of a nuclear missile.

“You are aware that hand luggage may not exceed 7kg, I want you to pick up your bags and lift it to shoulder height with one hand, arm extended.  If you can do that, it means the bag’s weight is inside the limit”.  Scrawny watches my daughter who herself barely weighs 45kg.  I only smile this time, turning my head away from my wife and dropping my elbow to block the expected punch, should she look my way.  My daughter may be tiny but we all practice sports and even she can lift quite a bit more than 7kg above shoulder height – repetitively.  Scrawny nods his head and looks at my wife who works out more than the rest of us combined.  I meet her eyes and stifle the giggle, swinging her bag from my right shoulder while letting mine drop from my left.  She takes the bag from me and lets it float above her shoulder, as I detect a glint in her eyes and a smile on her lips (she denied it later, aiming for my ribs again).  I’ve carried both our kit-bags from the parking lot and knew hers to weigh closer to 20kg.  Scrawny points to me: “you too”.  I started to laugh, ducking my wife’s kit-bag which suddenly swung toward my face.  I shook my head, this is it.  I’m not nearly as big as Victor Mattfield but I’m not Tiny Tim either.  With utter indignation, but only because my wife told me to do it, I picked up my bag.  I dearly wanted to pretend that I couldn’t lift it, especially having had both bags hoisted onto my shoulders which Scrawny could clearly see.  I knew if I had my fun now, it was going to be a very long weekend in Somerset West.  My son and future son-in-law, smilingly followed suit, not uttering a word as they saw the assaults my wife unleashed on me.

Scrawny handed over the boarding passes and then enquired if we had any prohibited articles as per the ten mile long list, prompting my wife to confess to having a 5cm long pair of tweezers in her handbag.  Scrawny insisted that it had to go into the golf bag or be confiscated as a dangerous article.  I asked no one in particular how a terrorist or would be hi-jacker could intimidate the captain or crew with a pair of tweezers.  “Fly me to Afghanistan or I shall remove your nose hairs with this weapon!!!”  My son mentioned that it would be quite painful to pluck a man’s body hair out with tweezers.  My daughter, the perpetual pragmatist reckoned one could stick it in someone’s eye.  I replied that sticking my finger in someone’s eye would be a hundred times more painful than tweezers.  “Drop it”, the battle-axe hissed in my ear.  I dropped everything, including her 20kg bag on my left foot.  “Stop horsing around”.  I picked up the bag and limped behind the rest of the entourage.

Son-in-law was missing in action.  Turns out he went off to buy a pencil as none of us had a pen for my wife to do her Soduko with on the plane.  He returned as we filed past the boarding gate, clutching a 15cm long sharpened pencil with a metal South African flag attached at the blunt end.  Now that is something I would prefer to a pair of 5cm tweezers if I needed an improvised weapon.  But that was okay.  Surely, anybody who could write would never dream of stabbing someone with a pencil.  Through the eye, it would reach your brain, between the ribs, it would reach the heart.  “You’re sick” I heard my wife say without opening her mouth.  She’s very good at telepathy, you know.  She tells me to come home when I’m having a quick beer after work without using her phone.  I hear her talking into my right ear as clearly as if she is standing right next to me.  It always gives me such a jolt that I invariably choke on the golden fluid and leave right away.

We board the half empty plane.  The three youngsters are in row E, my wife and I in row ZZZ, just in front of the tail fin and exhaust.  The two rows in front of us are empty.  The row diagonally across to the right is empty.  The stewardess announces that, once we have reached cruising altitude, we are free to move around the aircraft and sit anywhere we like for as long as we like before moving off again.  Or we could stay right where we were.  Why on earth did Scrawny want to know if we were traveling together on a half empty aircraft, if he was hell bent on trying not to even seat us on the same aircraft?

What a glorious weekend!  Monday arrived far too quickly.  As we packed the kit-bags, my wife, in her eternal wisdom said it would be wise (wise for me to do as I’m told) to check on the web-site if the scheduled return flight was not delayed. I duly checked every 20 minutes, just to be on the safe side.  Five minutes before we had to leave for the airport, I checked again and proudly announced that the flight was still on schedule, no rotation with a snowball effect seems to have crept into the system.

We arrive at the check-in counter with me approaching with two kit-bags, one in each hand, arms extended, lifting and lowering them as I walk for all to see that neither of them weighed close to 7kg.  As my wife turned around to see where I was, I pretended to only hoist the bags onto my shoulders.  I could see this did not convince her.  No weighing, no body building exercises were requested.  With a sweet smile, the lovely young lady behind the counter informed us that, unfortunately, the flight was slightly delayed – only 50 minutes – due to; No, not rotation this time:  There was a problem with the aircraft’s fuel line.  I turned around to go and re-rent the car as we were driving back to Jozi, no arguments.   Misjudging the move I covered my ribs.  Quicker than a Cobra’s strike, my wife grabbed me by the lobe of my left ear and pulled me towards the coffee shop.

You do not tell passengers about to board the plane that there was something as seriously wrong with it as a malfunctioning fuel line.  Rather expect me to eat up the crap of rotating snowballs! I bemoaned the situation.  We did not board only 50 minutes late – by my calculations as per Scrawny’s math’s, we should be arriving at Lanseria in about 11 hours and 23 minutes, that is if we do not run out of fuel first, which would mean that we would arrive in Caledon sometime before midnight, next Wednesday – with a bang.  Due to snowing rotation balls or faulty fuel pumps, I’m fairly confused by now, we left a half an hour late.  The captain assured us, it was no fault of Ghoulish Air as the fuel supply-line pumping jet fuel to the airport had a problem and we had to wait for the aircraft to be filled.  Bit of a different take on the line Miss Smiley fed us.

Published by

Johan van Zyl

I was born on 6 June 1961, six days into the new Republic of South Africa and the 17th anniversary of D-Day. For the moment I am employed in the private Sector as a Logistics professional, residing in Johannesburg – where I was born and bred. Apparently there are only two types of people in the world: those who make things happen and those who wonder what the hell just happened. I am an aspiring novelist – aren’t we all – and love to wonder about the simplicity as well as complicity that make us human, although I sometimes wonder if we have really evolved from being single cell organisms. I love life as well as a handful of people. Next to being outdoors, reading and writing are high on my priority list. I love company, even my own – sometimes.