Canary Droppings

Fawlty Towers

Yes, I finally got to my new table but not without event. I looked quite different and that not my tan – I was in African garb, a white kaftan with matching trousers.

As we were ushered in, I was about to ask one of the waiters for where my table was since I missed breakfast and did not have the presence of mind to check that out yesterday night and I missed breakfast on Christmas morning.

The maître d’ I had seen the previous two nights was a stand-in, the bigger Big Ben was back and singled me out asking if I had a table. Yes, I do have a table and the number is 38, which should have sufficed; the only thing was I did not know where it was.

But, our headmaster was not convinced, he wanted my room number which checked out right and no apology came after that.

Makes you wonder where these people get their training from or maybe I am an extra on Fawlty Towers and I have already had enough run-ins with Basil and Manuel – at least Manuel learnt English from a book, these people are lacking in every bit of courtesy for a hotel that aspires to the standard it advertises.

I can see my write-up for TripAdvisor taking a very unflattering flavour and when I leave on the 9^th I wonder if a worthwhile tip would lighten my wallet, quite unlikely, the way things are.

Watching for time

As I returned to my hotel in the witching hour I could not help but notice that dotted around Playa del Ingles are neon signs that show the time, date and temperature. However, I do worry if the sign at the chemist is 20 minutes off, how can other information be trusted?

I would be very careful if I were to get my prescriptions from that chemist, nothing as dangerous as ingesting the wrong dose – maybe one can get the stomach pumped, but when injected, you better have a guardian angel who knows about antidotes.

As for time, I need to do something about my watch, it does dual-time and I switch to other regions using the world time function, the hour and minute hands however need to be advanced by the push of a button when one is on the Hand Adjust mode.

So far, my watch has not budged one bit for the hand adjustment so, I am reading two times and having to compute if I am where I am supposed to be – I think I should just get a plain watch, nothing fancy and probably one that self-winds, has automatic date adjust, shows moon phases, has a second hand and does dual time.

Gosh! I am back where I started again – I hate my watch being crowded out with all these functions which is why I got this one and now, hardly 3 months on, it is not exactly what I want.

My maître d'hotel is a car salesman

Stars without class

I have stayed in many hotels some have stars and some have class – one must confess compared to the Riu Palace Maspalomas where I stayed in September and regret not getting a room there this time, my current abode – also of the Riu brand – shares the same number of stars but has nowhere near the class.

I was late for dinner on my first night; just 25 minutes into what normally runs into 2 hours at what was essentially a buffet dinner and the reception had no sense to arrange for me to be accommodated considering it was the last session rather than the early dinner schedule.

Draft cooling curiosity

Then on the second night, I was put on a table near the entrance where the draft helped cool my food before my fork touched the plate, it was also a bit isolated – I like to make conversation with people around me – so when the maître d’ came round I asked for a table more in the middle of the restaurant which he promised to resolve the next night with the assurance that the table I was on for only for the night.

Imagine my disdain and discomfiture when I arrived yesterday night to be told I had been promised the new table for Wednesday – I could only see that the maître d’ was not so much a sophisticated well-bred host but a car-salesman in a tuxedo – the thought sent shivers down my spine.

Later he tried to make amends by grudgingly offering me table from the Christmas night until the end of my holiday somewhere in the middle that I have to find when the evening comes.

Buffets and society

Buffets bring out a lot in a place that brings together all sorts of people and one would expect that no matter what standing you have in life, when you join up to a social setting like a hotel resort, the very basic middle-class values are required like queuing up, taking your turn, serving yourself just enough and not mixing the serving spoons.

I am afraid to say I observed too much; the big bluff man who put the sardine serving spoon into the egg mayonnaise having jumped the queue and piled up the world on his plate or was it the lady who after getting her cream-cake dessert then poured some milk over it – Yuk!

Beyond that, some people look like they have just come from some ordeal of chronic starvation that they have four plates of all sorts in front of them – utterly dreadful gluttons they might as well be the kitchen waste-bins and never be satisfied.

Taking half-board accommodation on holiday has its benefits, you do not have to book restaurants or search for different kinds of cuisine, sometimes you end up doing your own cooking – really, not when one is on holiday – it is all inclusive apart from drinks and there is some routine to the whole thing. Care should be taken to appreciate the quality of the restaurant before making that decision though.

It is a microcosm of the good, the bad and the downright ugly – we all have a bit of that in ourselves and what we try to do is accentuate the good, eliminate the bad and hopefully conceal the ugly and try and make it beautiful, if we can.

The bulge of the balloon

Balloons, I love Christmas balloons – all colours and all shapes – but the ones I have seen were not blown up with air for Christmas but over years of careless ill-disciplined lives or sometimes plausible medical reason are blown up with lipids and fat.

Rather than be more discrete about show it off, they pour themselves into ill-fitting tight clothes that then give them ballooning characteristics, bulges in the wrong places – sights too shocking that one is almost compelled to protest vehemently for the assault to ones viewing space.

These people are in need of a serious resolution and they should not wait till the New Year to begin to shed half that weight and they would have barely hit the mark for being the right weight – the trouble we put our bodies through, 4 paces and panting like you’ve done a marathon – life can surely be better than that.

Now, I have nothing against people with Body Mass Indices over 25, some people are predisposed to that kind of anatomical development, this particular diatribe is directed at ones who delude themselves into wearing clothes multiple sizes smaller than their frame in the hope that something fantastic is happening – such self-delusion is typical of people who spend the first one hour in a gym for years and start looking in the mirror – it is a body not plastercine.

To bring some Christmas cheer, the sun is out, it is about 24° Celsius and time to top up my tan.

Have a Merry Christmas and keep an eye on the turkey.

Unfasten your seat belts

Arrived safely

An update to the events of yesterday, regarding my flight to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

The control tower did not suffer complete radio silence; we arrived at our destination just about 4 hours 10 minutes behind schedule.

When I wrote the piece yesterday, my flight was delayed for a total of 2 hours 20 minutes, we finally boarded the alternate flight just after 3 hours of waiting and it was interesting to see one of those Dutch attitudes at play.

Seats for bags

I have written before that people have a tendency to occupy an extra seat for their bags on the bus, trams, trains and metro – well, since we had open seating on the plane, as I got on the plane, there were seats all up to halfway down the flight which were occupied by bags.

This is reminiscent of the generalised view that Germans pre-reserve beach seats and sun loungers with their towels in the witching hour (Someone burnt the towels) – my hotel has a big notice advising people to desist from that poor social attitude.

Indeed, there is some administrative encumbrance with pre-allocating seats but that means seating is efficient and people are forced to use the overhead bins or the space on the floor in front of them under then the seat.

Now, other advantages meant people could seat together with their large companies, it also meant, I was far from squealing children, especially, the ones that are completely implacable.

Safety instruction – unfasten seat beats

My fear however was about the flight being crewed by people unfamiliar with the layout of the plane considering I had recently watched the sinking of ship that lead to the major loss of life because the ship was crewed by people unfamiliar with the layout of the boat.

As we settled down, the captain welcomed us on board though without an apology from TUI, rather, he said they were stepping in for AkeFly, however, we had another 30 minutes to wait because the plane needed to be refuelled.

When the fuel truck arrived we were told more than twice to take off our seatbelts, I suppose that would be as a precaution if the highly volatile fuel were to spill, cause noxious fumes or catch fire.

In read now that in 2000 there was such an incident about fuel estimation/starvation and short landings - Hapag-Lloyd Flight 3378.

For the third possibility, I could not imagine how that tightly packed plane would have been evacuated – in fact, in the 80s there was a fire at the Johnson Wax aerosol factory in Lagos where my uncle worked and one of the things people said was people were getting seriously burnt but no one could see the flames – thankfully, my uncle was far away from the event though for a while there was someone else who shared his surname who had been caught in the inferno and eventually needed treatment in the States – we were beside ourselves for a while.

I cannot remember seeing the safety choreography and that is probably because the crew of HapagFly were German, but then English should have sufficed.

In fact, none of the safety instructions would have helped save passengers – seat belts, air masks, life jackets, brace position or getting to the emergency exits – we were put at very serious risk, though thankfully nothing untoward happened.

Better than ArkeFly

We took off and we were served hot meals, probably a stable for HapaqFly denied the Dutch on ArkeFly; same company but different services for different countries.

When flight TFL 119 which replaced OC 109 finally landed, there was sporadic applause for work well done and now an apology for the delay – my travel agent says I should still get a basic refund for not travelling Comfort Class, but I do not think charter flights are covered by the EU Passenger Rights charter that would have had some major compensation for delaying the flight for more than 2 hours.

Having learnt from the coach transfer experience that had us delivered last to our hotel, my taxi transfer was smooth and the only bit of detail not satisfied was I asked for a room as high as possible in a 7-floor hotel and ended up on the 3^rd floor.

Today, I am not one shawl short of an Eskimo warding off the cold, but one g-string short of a beach bum – it is about to rain, but we have had temperatures in the 20s of Celsius already.

Rain tales of egrets

Talking of rain, when it did rain yesterday the sun was also shining – it reminded me of what we were told as kids – the rain and sun at the same time indicates a midwifery duty of nature as the lioness is having cubs. Ekùn ń bímo (Yoruba – The lion is having babies).

Another such tale was when we saw cattle egrets flying past we waved our back hands and sang out that believing we would get a white pigment stain on our finger nails (If only we knew that was a sign of some serious medical condition) – the egret in Yoruba legend is known for being white and clean no matter how dirty it gets. Lékeléke gbà mí léèke (Yoruba – Egrets please give me a mark).

Ah! The sun shines again – should I use factor-10 with UVA/UVB protection?

ArkeFly TUI Holland International group of cowboys

Extending a root canal

I think it is now a given that my travelling is always an event and almost always irksome. As if I did not promise myself that I would not travel ArkeFly anymore because their Comfort Class was just as much comfort as being cooped up in Economy apart from the fact that one had to buy ones refreshments.

Well, it so happened that my holiday destination only had offerings from ArkeFly (NL) which is part of the TUI AG group that has Thomson Travel (UK) and Holland International as part of its stable of travel companies.

At first, I needed to extend my holiday; one would think it was just a open web site, type in reference number, get prompted with choices to cancel, modify, check-in etc, then if any other payments need to be made, that all gets updated.

Not really, the travel agents lamented the fact that the Holland International staff are usually very helpful but they are seriously let down by the rotten inflexible system they have to work with.

Suffice it to say that a holiday extension is best done by cancelling the existing booking and setting up a new one with the extension included, you can then pay the difference.

After a 10-minute wait and some 30 more minutes of stop-and-start conversation, it got done.

My ride to the airport arrived just in time at 3:30AM – I am still beside myself as to how I ended up booking a flight as early as 6:20AM – when I got to the airport I collected my updated ticket and went to check-in.

Arke-Flying Carpet

One look at the departures screen revealed I was going to have an exciting day – my flight was already delayed 1 hour 40 minutes, by the time I posted a letter in the postbox, another 40 minutes had been added to that delay.

As I checked in at the Comfort Class desk, I was trying to get an upgrade when I was told the flight we were to board was still in Las Palmas due to technical problems and ArkeFly was hiring another plane from a German company to take us there.

Trepidation! Foreign crew, strange pilots – just the mindset you need for a long holiday. I have been watching too much National Geographic television.

The greater humiliation was to come – there would be no classes on this plane but cattle class and then the seating was open. I had to run that past the check-in clerk again – “You mean we are going to get on that plane like we are getting on a bus?”

She nodded in the affirmative, this is definitely not how I intended to start my holiday and I am being placated with a Food & Beverage Voucher for Menzies Aviation to the mighty cost of EUR 4.95 for a continental breakfast, which seems to cost less than a snack.

There are some rights I think I am entitled to somewhere, unfortunately, people would not be too forceful about this because, we all want to go on holiday and the last thing we want is some rotten company which happens to be the one of the largest travel companies in the world messing up our holiday with cack-handed incompetence.

I’ll rather pay for a coffee than go around presenting a food stamp for a mendicant’s sop.

Six Sevens are ...

Giving Thanks

And Blessed be the Most High God who by His great mercy and loving-kindness when the fruit was shed before its season brought me to life and health to the joy of my parents who first held me in the single palm of a hand.

Thus far, I have been blessed, loved, honoured, lifted, encouraged, inspired and rewarded – I am grateful and thankful that He that has brought me this far would see me through to the end.

Much has been done, much more needs to be done and a lot is yet unfinished – a continuous work in progress seeking perfection, seeking completion, seeking fulfilment and seeking rest.

And so, like Apostle Paul did say of old – “we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead”, one sees that faith takes you to a place beyond your strength and abilities to a place of the miraculous.

We have to trust that our impossible situations are changeable beyond our myopic perceptions and I have seen many this year and in years gone by.

Today, at 42, my life is still a miracle, there might be many like me, but I would never be like anybody else but myself – at the end of my 6^th 7-year period; I shall enter into a rest of rewarding comfort, a time where nobody lives in this world without leaving a mark and having touched someone else - they also leave memories - fond and bad, one thing we can never deny is that they were once part of our lives – let the building of a legacy continue.

It is amazing what birthdays bring out of you. Thanks first and then really crazy thoughts (+_+).

Birthday Blogs

Two Score and One - 2006

Life Begins again with 40 refreshing breaths - 2005

39 Steps - 2004

Birthdays - 2003

NB: (I remember reciting the times tables in primary school; we never said six times seven 42, we said six sevens are 42)

Cold Work Letters

Being an Eskimo

What a week this is turning out to be and one cannot say all is in complete order as the brook that runs beside my office complex is already frozen over, my bowler hat is having more of a showing - hardly a fashion statement; I am looking one shawl short of an Eskimo – it is dreadfully cold here and snowing in Spain – more like Global Cooling to me.

We had a meeting on Friday where I more or less offered a draft job description for a new role they are considering me for. So far, it looks like the carrot too far off for the giraffe to have a sweet gnaw – the last day at work might well be Friday.

Since, I have hardly had time to myself, we might just make that Thursday, I have left it too late to plan a decent birthday buffet at work, taking the day off might just help me prepare better for my holiday – sometimes, I wonder how I ended up on a flight leaving at 6:20AM – some things just pass you by even if you are deep inside the detail of the event.

Two minds on one job

Besides, I find myself with two understudies having lost my trusted sidekick to a long indisposition and work piling up like the Three Gorges Dam robbing us of all that is good in nature – I still have my deliverables to manage as I have to do this, comment on that, advice on something and letting nothing get me livid with rage - difficult!.

The difference between a national headquarters and international headquarters in the Netherlands is simple; there is hot water in the lavatories of the latter. A visit there earlier today confirmed what we knew all along, our Oracle developers have to solve a performance problem that have tried hard to foist upon us.

Indeed, there was once a performance problem on our systems, but that has since been patched away, the pre-existing Oracle performance problem has persisted through our transition and not been resolved.

That is my problem with developers, they are fanatical, fundamentalist and believe themselves infallible in thought, deed and code – such delusion hampers productivity and holds up the business as others have to conclusively prove that the problem is squarely with rotten code in production serving the function of helping run the business – Shocking!

Credit Crunch Reprieve?

Meanwhile, amidst the Christmas cards and early birthday cards in the post, I am expecting a letter that would never arrive.

Was it not cheap credit first and lies that got us into the impending 2008 recession (imagined or debunked) and the current credit crunch?

But rather than stand up for fiscal rectitude and tough monetary policies the central banks in Europe, the UK, Canada, Switzerland and the US are offering cheap loans to banks to help them trust each other enough to lend to each other. See illustration of the sub-prime crisis here .

Now, in the light of such laxity and lack of backbone, one would expect my mortgage company to offer a double-whammy present for my birthday and Christmas with the title – Credit Crunch Reprieve, the message being my mortgage rates have now been refrozen to the rate I had in November 2005 for 5 years. Fat Chance!

Out of the mouth of babes - PNG at Climate Summit

Almost farce

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was at the risk of precipitating into a farce – apart from the decision of Australia to sign and ratify the Kyoto Protocol there was very little good news coming from the convention.

It took the new blood of a new government to change the view of Australia, but we have still had to deal with the recalcitrance of the United States which is now isolated amongst the big Western powers on this subject.

When Al Gore, the Nobel Laureate took centre-stage at the convention he was solemn in stating that his own country was the main impediment to progress in coming to the right kind of consensus, it was the inconvenient truth.

Engage first for consensus

There is no doubt that there is some sense in involving the emerging and developing countries in any framework, but the leadership of the developed economies is first critical by example and persuasion with firm objectives to gain support of all concerned – this climate issue is a global emergency to many losing lands, habitat, water, species and means to survive – something we in the comfort of our detached affluent existence cannot begin to fully appreciate.

The UN Secretary-General reluctantly had to address (BBC Video) the delegations expressing his disappointment that no agreement or consensus was being met, then an accusation that the head of the conference was not running the conference with professional conduct left the poor, exhausted man in tears – offering tissues to wipe the tears would have left me bereft of green credentials even if empathy matters.

Lead, follow or get out of the way

Then the delegate from Papua New Guinea (CIA World Fact Book) had something to say and before we get to that, I would rely on Wikipedia to give us a general idea of where it stands in the world – 54^th in land space, 104^th in population, 204^th in population density, 131^st in per capita GDP – he said – “We have a saying, if you are not prepared to lead get out of the way”, he went on to excoriate the United States and pointedly asked them to “either lead, follow or get out of the way”.

By all accounts, it was the most stinging rebuke and I would not be surprised if the media is not showcasing that delegate - Harvard-educated Kevin Conrad - every time countries meet up about climate change and things are getting tough and strained – no doubt, these conferences thrive more on brinkmanship than diplomacy; but for countries we expect to be in leadership to become the stumbling blocks of process, progress, compromise or consensus, we recognise their inability to listen and inability to persuade – consequently, their inability to lead.

It is quite poignant that Mr. Conrad was using America's own words against it when at the beginning of the week, James Connaughton, President Bush's climate change adviser said, "We will lead. We will continue to lead but leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow." I am sorry, one other thing he should have realised was that he cannot expect blind follower-ship - we are not ready to fall in line with bad leadership - that should at least be the prerogative of the follower and not at the coercion of leadership. (Source of quote: The Daily Telegraph )

A looming embarrassment

We must not forget that George W. Bush’s alternative climate summit scheduled for January next year was at risk of having no guests if no agreements were reached this time round, and this would have been a serious embarrassment – I am of the view that it should be boycotted anyhow, the United States has to learn to adapt to consensus global politics in issues that affect us all.

It might take the new blood of new government to gain a fully engaged partnership the United States in the climate change debate, but we do not have the time to wait till 2009 for that to happen.

If it takes Papua New Guinea and their sense of the obvious effects of climate change to tell the United States to wake up to their responsibilities – so be it – like the Scriptures say – Out of the mouth of babes … We now have an agreement of sorts.