At the moment I am trying to travel to Edinburgh for a week of Exadata Prove of Concept.
The basic idea was to leave Vienna on sunday evening and arrive in Edinburgh on sunday night.
As I tried to do an online checkin on Saturday evening - I discovered the flights where shifted to monday evening. - That was not my initial plan as one day missing on a 5 days PoC is not so nice.
After some research I discovered my initial flight from Vienna to Amsterdam was cancelled. But there was still an earlier flight on sunday lunchtime. As the flights where booked at +KLM I checked on their website for some way to get support (note, it was saturday, late evening).
To my concern there where no 24 hr telephone numbers or web interfaces - but they mentioned to contact their twitter or facebook account. So I just gave @KLM a try, Even I was skeptical about support via twitter. But They really responded, asked for some details and booked me on the earlier flight on sunday.
I was very happy about that and made my way to Schiphol. There I had to wait for about 6 hours for my flight to Edinburgh. Waiting on an airport is never fun, but in Schiphol it was much better than on many other airports I've seen so far!
But while I enjoyed the airport, it began to snow. Some flights got cancelled, more flights got cancelled, my flight got cancelled! Of course that's not nice and none is doing it on purpose. I am traveling alone, no other people to take care of, even without my luggage I am well equipped for such a weather, so no big deal at all.
First I needed a place to stay. So heading for the proper counter. I was not the only one whose flight was cancelled so this lead to some queueing. In this time, serious queueing! If you ever have a harddisk response time gone up from 10ms to 50ms due to queueing issues, and call this hard, you just don't know.
Well, after some hours I got my hotel voucher. - Off to the next queue. This time transfer busses to the hotels. In my case it was a hotel with about 400 rooms - a roundtrip time of 20-30 min and 2 small busses which could handle at about 12 passengers. Please do the math!
Lucky as I am I got a nice room in Ramada Apollo Amsterdam.
After 2 beers at the bar I decided to head to my room. Midnight was over already.
But before I went to bed - one more tweet to send - and to ask for another flight to Edinburgh.
The next morning I had my direct message - the new flight was arranged by KLM twitter support: 15:35
There was still plenty of time, so I decided to stay at the hotel for some more time. Started up my laptop and do some work.
Transfer to Schiphol and checkin where flawless, So I'm sitting here and waiting for boarding to flight KL1285. As there is always enough work I can do remote, the time is at least of limited use.
There is just one question I'd like to know: Why do I need to travel to a small town in Schottland for a prove of concept where I will use the same Laptop and the same terminal application, do not need any "high speed low latency" connection and do not need to get in touch with the physic at all?
