Early morning, Paris, lounges and gate changes

In CDG, was greeted by an unfriendly monitor system. There was only one tiny monitor among the zillions indicating where to go for checkin. Finally found the desk. The checkin desk ladies told me to bugger off and come back later, checkin for that flight hadn’t yet started. Oh well, since I had some hours to go, I thought, why not go hang out in the lounge and get some work done. But oh no, turns out Priority Pass is not good enough for the lounges in CDG2. You need to be in CDG1, and your flight needs to take off from there. Argh. Nowhere to sit, except in the cafe, where people smoke, so no good either. (I hate smoking. If you want to be my unfriend, smoke near me.)

So… walked around randomly until the checkin started to check in. Checked in. Found the kilometre-long security queue to the gate (at CDG2B there’s one security point per 2 gates, not a “master” one like in most other places). Finally at the gate… or so I thought. Sat with the laptop, even managed to get online… somewhat… it kept asking for the password every 10 seconds though so not very useful. Plus I had had a plan that I can charge the laptop batteries at the lounge, so I obviously hadn’t charged them, so I was out of juice anyway.

Then I was getting worried because the Elbonian Air plane should have landed at the gate already but it was nowhere to be seen. And then the lady starts speaking “the gate has been changed”. Oh cool. So get out of here, and into another kilometre-long security queue, go through it. I seem to be at the right place, although there’s no place to verify it since the monitors displaying the destination happily say “IMAGE TEST JAUNE MAGENTA BLUE”. And the plane outside is still some Kreplakistan Air, not Elbonian Air that I’m supposed to be getting.

So they start boarding people, which means you go to a bus that is full of people but devoid of any breathable air and wait for many many minutes. And FINALLY the bus takes you to the aircraft. The right one indeed. Cool.

I had expected to have lunch on the plane since I couldn’t work since I was out of laptop power juice, and it’s bad enough that you have to buy your own food in Elbonian economy class, except that they’re out of it and can’t sell you any except some Pringles. So there’s my lunch. Oh well. I could read a book at least. I didn’t read books for long, but now I do again. It’s fun.

So the Elbonian lands in one piece and almost on time, and they even haven’t lost my luggage. Phew. To home in one piece.

Except that when powering things on for the first time after being away for a month, nothing works?!?! I don’t get no Internet on the cable modem and some of the digital channels on TV aren’t working. How cool is that. Call the provider customer support. Of course the lines are all booked. Call again 10 times. At least the service rep I got was good and knew what she was talking about. Re the digital TV, it boiled down to “I’m too stupid to use it”. And turns out when you’re away for a long time, it takes something like an hour for the cable modem to “reboot” and reinitialize the service. Which finally indeed starts again. FINALLY. All is working. All is good. Just another day passed. Check.