04.10.2011

Thoughts on a plane - I am of course referring to the prosaic (but amazing) technical achievement of the aeroplane, rather than to otherworldly spheres of thought.

I am flying in an Airbus A321 from Munich to Naples. A three-generation Italian family is in constant sound and motion in front of me. The children are getting bored now that the afternoon snack is finished; I have my headphones on, listening to Carl Craig & Moritz von Oswald's Deutsche Grammophon Recomposed mix of Ravel's Bolero (mashed with Mussorgsky); I'm relaxed and in a good mood, so the children aren't too annoying.

The Italian next to me is reading his Reppublica.

I am tapping away on the virtual keyboard of my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7", hitting the 'delete' button more than anything else.

Really I don't have anything to say for this blog entry; this is just something to keep me occupied until the fasten seatbelts sign is switched on and we have to switch off our electronic items. I am in typical 'brain coast' mode, not overtaxing myself, but presenting my synapses with the challenge of selecting appropriate words in a stream of unprepared typing. Just to see where this all leads.

Today is all very European, despite the Samsung and the Shure headphones. The Airbus is the epitome of European collaboration, politics, questionable finance and beating the Americans. I'm flying over the Alps to Italy where I will eat wonderful food and drink fine wine.

I like Europe, but I don't know how I want it to be.

Fasten seatbelts, let's do Napoli.

05.10.2011

Put short, Naples could easily be described as a characature of Italy. Take for example and especially the motorcyclists on the Tangenziale; one sitting upright at the handlebars in order to have both hands free for his mobile phone, another gesticulating whilst talking into his (at least hands-free) helmet headset. The cars jockeying for position in the clogged city arteries (using my Milan driving mantra of knowing where everything is, but pretending that you don't). The wonderful weather, the port smell and the smog over the city. The sheer number of people out and about in the centre - the life - on a Tuesday evening. The wonderful dinner (fish and fruits of the sea) in an unassuming restaurant near our hotel in Pomigliano. The 'man bags' (handbags for men) and the big sunglasses. It was all there.

From the strucutre of a typical blog, I would now normally explain here all the very good reasons why Naples isn't a characature of Italy; there simply aren't any, though. None at all.

And that's brilliant.

04.10.2011

I'm in Frankfurt airport awaiting my flight to Munich and then on to Naples of which I will of course see very little, this being a business trip for meetings with Fiat tomorrow. It's a lovely day, the airport isn't too busy this lunchtime and it feels invigorating to be on the move again.

I almost wrote 'good' there, but I can't catagorically state that it is good in itself.

Yes, we're supporting the customer even better than can be expected (the presence of an 'expert from Germany' lends weight to our arguments) but there's nothing coming up that my Italian colleagues cannot sort out by themselves. And it'll be the first time that my wife will have to put both daughters to bed by herself - not a task to take lightly with a three year-old and a two month-old. Of course it'll all work out, but the first time is naturally the most stressful.

In both senses, then, it's of limited virtue but it's still a bit of a nice break from office work for me. It beats work, as my Dad always used to say.

Right, then, boarding time.

My business trips are now rare in comparison to how things were a few years ago. I count myself lucky as this dip has coincided nicely with starting a family. So from monthly trips to Asia and almost weekly trips to Germany from the UK, I now occasionally fly to Italy to meet suppliers and drive around Germany meeting customers. And read bedtime stories.

This week I ended up on a more unusual trip, to Dacia in Romania, to discuss some issues that they have been having in production. It was to have been a relatively relaxed journey, flying to Bucharest from Frankfurt airport early in the afternoon to stay in an airport hotel until my colleague from Turkey arrived early the next morning. Alas, though, systems happened.



We have the Egencia travel booking system at work; it is the business version of Expedia. Egencia turned out to be a nightmare for rapid turnaround travel as it has an - in itself eminently sensible - approval system built in. The problem is that these approvals need to be completed within a certain time, presumably in order to protect us all from monstrous price rises as the flight date nears. As soon as I had understood the need, I booked my flights on Friday afternoon. The approval deadline (written in very small letters in the confirmation email) was set for 20:00 that evening, when my manager and his boss were unlikely to be reading emails. The same happened on Monday, as the pair were out of the office. When it came to my flight on Tuesday, I thought that it had been confirmed, as Uwe had submitted his consent; but I discovered when I arrived to collect my eTicket - no ticket. My seat had been cancelled.

So, following a frantic round of internet bookings, phone calls and awaiting confirmation, I ended up on the late flight to Bucharest. On that flight over clouds lit by a full moon we passed a thunderstorm in the distance; the flashes of light within that dark mass of cloud were awe inspiring. We landed uneventfully at a quarter to midnight.

Bucharest airport has a new terminal that is perfectly inoffensive, but the signage is terrible. When I asked the infodesk how to get to my airport hotel, they sent me down a flight of stairs and a ramp into a dark car park occupied by an off duty, wide-boy taxi driver who convinced me to part with 20 Euros (the smallest note I had at the time) for a 2 minute ride to the hotel and, in the meantime, proceeded to tell me how insignificant 20 Euros was to me, especially as the company would pay for it, how the French were so arrogant, the Maroccans working for Dacia even more so...

My room was fine, though blighted by that most east european of curses, the endlessly barking and yapping dog outside. It reminded me of my earlier 'adventures' in Liberec but I was at least tired enough to get to sleep relatively quickly this time around.

The next day I met my colleague Ilker at the airport and we found the taxi that he had pre-arranged. It was an ageing Dacia Logan that took us lumpily (with noticeable wheel wobble) through an ageing, shabby Bucharest suburb onto the motorway. Half way along that obviously European money edifice, the taxi was suddenly surrounded by a cloud of black smoke and then white steam, the engine revved out of control, we stopped on the hard shoulder and got out to survey the damage.

The engine was obviously not going to restart, despite the taxi driver's best efforts, so he started to make some phone calls. He initially offered a replacement taxi, but that, too, would have taken 45 minutes to get to us. Instead, he started to wave the traffic down. Astoundingly, within a few minutes a van transporting another (new) Dacia on its flat bed stopped and agreed to take Ilker and I to Pritesti, a town near to Mioveni which was our ultimate destination (well, my ultimate destination was home, but I couldn't possibly write that in LinkedIn). We were met there by another taxi and finally we arrived at Dacia.

We were offered a small coffee.

The meeting wasn't terribly effective as our customers didn't seem to have the faintest idea of what we were talking about; which meant that they would not change their view that we were at fault for a particular issue. However, when I pointed out that there was no evidence whatsoever that what they were experiencing was linked in any way to our parts, they seemed to go a little bit quieter still.

I got home again, in the end and thanks to the worst "quiche lorraine" on the planet courtesy of a certain large German airline, I even arrived with a little bit of energy to spare.