…or just more fun at the airport and in the plane…

Since I joined the Microsoft EMEA Office 12 Early Adoption team last year October I spent nearly every month at least two times in a plane. I guess you still remember my first flight-experience I blogged about… and guess what, since that point of time 50% of my flights have been a flight experience:)

And last week - when heading with one of our enterprise customers and two colleagues to a enterprise strategy briefing to Redmond/Seattle, I (we) had yet another one. In the meantime I really, really love it - it’s so funny that so many people complain about the train… I believe they all don’t know about the plane.

As said, we were heading towards Seattle/SEATAC from Vienna through New York. And believe me, NY/JFK airport is like hell. First the flight had some problems in Austria before starting from Vienna. When we entered the machine, the loud-speaker system produced really annoying noise. And shortly after boarding was completed the captain made an announcement: “Äehm, maybe you have recognized that our loud speaker system has… well… a little problem”. My head was droning at that point of time already, like hell. Of course, the captain pointed out that they need to fix this problem resulting in about 1,5 hours delay. We only had 2,5 hours at New York for transfer. As you probably know, transfer in US is not as funny. Go out of the plane, discuss with the immigration officer about your trip then move on, pick up your luggage, then, after immigration, again deliver your luggage and then go to the transfer check in to discuss with an inflexible check-in counter guy about you and your flight you are probably not going to get if he does not enter your data quickly enough. But believe what, after all of these discussions we made it in 1 hour… from Terminal 9 to Terminal 1, discussion with luggage check-in guy, discussion with immigration, then … guess what … discussion with the transfer-check-in guy and then running to the plane, going through security (damn, I nearly forogt about this live experience) and then jump into the plane.

Ahh, we did it in time… and then… it just happened. The plane went out to the runway and stopped. Shortly afterwards the captain: “We are currently in a queue for takeoff, but the problem is that there are ‘n’ planes there at the same time… so we expect a delay of one hour before take-off”.

Yes… yes… that was great. Sitting one hour longer in one of those narrow, old American Airlines planes. I love them. And then the stewards (8 of them for a little plane) went through with their beverages and food just to tell us at the back rows that “food is out sir, but you can have some water”.

That’s flight experience - and after three of those it just gets funny;) But finally the briefing with the customer was really good - thanks to Eugenio once again for organizing this all…

As I go to Poland to the MTS conference there doing a session on Composite UI Application Block in October (I cannot find my session there as I have some language troubles there:))) and as I go to TechEd Europe: Developers as I am the track-owner of the Office Developer Track responsible for all the content and speakers there and doing one (or maybe two sessions there as well), and probably the Strategic Architect Forum in November as well I think I’ll have a YAFE soon again;)

(unfortunately I have no pictures about this flight-experience.. but I’ll try to get some from the next one)