6:45am. Wake in Paris, shower, shave, pack, cab, traffic, traffic, stress, traffic. Check-in, security, and suddenly it's 9:17am and Air France has given away your seats because it's less than an hour before scheduled departure. Never mind if the plane is half an hour late and they let Ken check in but not you. They gave your seat away.

So now I'm stuck an extra day in the hideous Sofitel Airport where it's faster to get from downtown Paris to the airport than from the airport to the hotel on their shuttle. Ordinarily an extra day in Paris wouldn't seem like a hardship but I'm tired and I miss home and thanks to Air France managing to only check in one of us, I'm alone. Another reason to hate Air France.

While I'm hating, I'm grateful for Internet in the hotel but screw you Orange for your WiFi implementation. For €20/day I'm given a network connection that dies every six hours or when NetNewsWire tries to download a bunch of RSS feeds. And their router silently intercepts my outgoing SMTP to deliver (and record?) mail through their servers rather than my own. The Internet is a hostile place.

culturetravelzurich2005
  2005-11-18 16:32 Z