After three weeks of fun in the sun, I’ve had one crappy week of ill in the chill.
Three sick days last week followed two of the most zombified days I’ve ever spent at work, barely shuffling along on autopilot.
I improved slowly over the week only to wake up this morning with a raw throat!
I should die!
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Sitting at the gate in Narita Airport on Thursday, a fellow traveler a few.seats.away was coughing up a storm. Thick, wet, low, growly coughs.
I thought that I was far enough away from him to be safe. He was coughing into a handkerchief for the most part. I was wrong.
On Saturday night, I started to cough a little and my chest felt scratchy. Sunday morning I was worse and had a fever. Last night was terrible as I was alternately freezing and burning and awake all night until the fever subsided around 5AM.
Here I am, first day back to work after vacation, sick as a dog and exhausted.
Why isn’t there a rule concerning visibly ill passengers? The gate personnel should have confronted Mr. Coffer and told him that for the sake of the other passenger’s health, he had to skip flying until he was well.
Dammy!
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Delta 747-400
Our recent flight from Manila to Narita was overbooked. The offer the counter agent gave us was $600 each and hotel accommodations if we gave up our seats. Needless to say, we didn’t take the offer. This morning Delta sent me an email asking me to take a survey and report our experience.
I answered their questions truthfully: we weren’t really affected by the overbooking, we didn’t accept the offer, we would have also liked a bump up to first class on the re-booked flight, etc.
Then, in space provided for other comments and suggestions, I told them just how awful their aircraft are to fly in for long trips.
All of the Philippine Airline 747-400′s I’ve been in are equipped for international flight even though they are also used for domestic runs between islands. All of them have touch screen seat back monitor, wider seats and, most importantly for long international flights, a push-down footrest on the seat in front of you.
PAL puts Delta to shame.
The three-four-three 747-400′s Delta flies for the four-hour flight from Manila to Narita have nothing. Even the in-flight entertainment is the old video-on-the-wall type with a sight-line that is invariably blocked by the head of the person in front of you.
For the ten-hour flight from Japan to the U.S. they offer two-three-two layouts and remote-controlled seat back monitors but the lack of legroom is unbearable even for me (I’m only 5’6″). I can’t imagine the agony a taller person goes through for ten hours.
Oh sure, for $120 more per person, per flight, I could have booked the new comfortable seats they have now in limited supply in Economy Class but that would have added another $1000 dollars to the flight costs.
For what it’s worth, I gave it to Delta on that survey. I don’t know if they’ll listen but I feel a little better now.
A Gumasa Beach
The trip home went off with only the smallest of hitches: I had packed the spare battery for our netbook in one of our checked bags and that was a no-no. Delta personnel at Narita pulled us out of the security re-check line and hustled us up to the gate so Menchu could unlock the bag and I could remove the battery.
I joked with her that at least now we knew how to beat the crowd to the plane during boarding: leave a battery pack in the bag and we’d get moved to the front!
Speaking of security re-checks, things are getting out of hand out there, people.
On the way out from the U.S. we went through the now-routine bag x-ray, discalcing, body scan and sinus cavity search before we got on the international flight to Narita. Ten hours later we deplaned and walked through a secure area in a long conga line only to run into an unexplained bottleneck.
After mooing and pawing at the carpet for a while, we stockyarders began to move and a Japanese Edith Bunker began to half-run around in circles calling out in a fluctuating soprano what we later realized were flights some of us were going to be made late for.
After some time, with small groups of us being picked off and disappeared by Edith-san, we saw what the hold-up was: a security check point.
As I explained below in an earlier post, Japanese officials were going to make people who had just spent ten hours on a flight go through xrays and bottle dumps again.
Edith-san came screeching back at that point and peeled a few of us away from the main herd, hustling us through the empty VIP station.
