On a trip to New York last month my wife and I flew Swiss International from Moscow with a stopover in Zurich. My wife had never flown with them before and I assured her that they were one of the best airlines on the planet. I still think they are, I just picked the wrong trip to tell her that.
On the nine-hour push out of Zurich we had no in-flight entertainment. No films, no radio. Zip. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we had been wearing blinkers (not so strange if you know us intimately, trust me) but in strict adherence to my ‘cabin luggage only’ rule, they didn’t make the grade. So, unblinkered, we were free to see that everyone around us—that’s everyone—was wearing the appropriate facial expressions for the movies they were happily watching. The plane was full and the stewardess’s multiple attempts at resetting the system didn’t help us.
On the way back we boarded a plane at JFK stoked to find that it was brand spanking new. If I’d closed my eyes for the first thirty rows then opened them, I’d have believed—albeit short-term—that I was on a plane full of business class seats. What I believed long-term though was that there was no way the same thing could happen to us on the flight home. Chance, I reckoned, would have our backs, after properly abandoning us the first time round. Even if that failed, then…hey…the plane was brand new!
I was sort of right. It couldn’t happen to us again...well not just us anyway.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that because this is a new plane…the entertainment system is not working.”
Excuse me?
That one took some figuring out. I’m still working on it now.
The announcer was Swiss-German, and although her English seemed very good I hoped there was something lost in translation. After take-off I realized there wasn’t. Something else that wasn’t lost was the image of that green and blue map on my screen, with its numerous helpful flight statistics.
33296 feet. 10148.6 meters. 543 miles per hour. 873.9 kilometers per…
I swear those figures remained burnt onto my corneas for a week.
We then arrived at my favorite airport of all time, Zurich, and were rolling on through the security checkpoint. My wife had bought a gleaming new white MacBook from the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue and had already fallen head over heels for it. Of course she was required to take it out of its bag for it to be scanned. The woman in charge of the x-ray machine’s conveyor belt then felt the need to turn the computer top-down in a tray which had previously been used on a construction site to transport some form of aggregate from one place to another. You can tell by the depth and number of scratches that are engrained on my beloved’s laptop now.
Sometimes in life you are faced with so much bad luck in such a short period that it truly bewilders you. Then you shake your head, exhale, and conclude that—
1. The movie selection was probably going to be everything from the depths of PG rated hell anyway.
2. The MacBook is luckily not a present for somebody back home, and
3. You have four working limbs and you aren’t being shot at by both sides of a war you have nothing to do with.
In short, you realize that the ‘bad luck’ was of quite a harmless variety. You just hope it remains so, as you slip back in your seat for that last leg of your journey, and cruise along at 33296 feet. 10148.6 meters. 543 miles per hour…
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