Next installment

So Im writing this in stages and way behind but I did really want to relay this story as i think i have unearhted a sinister international conspiracy.

I got to the airport in Mexico City to fly to meet the fam in Cancun. Now my experiences of flying in Peru taught me that flight times are a guideline at best. So I wasn't 100% sure that I would be landing on time. However...

She said somehting quickly in Spanish and although I don't speak Spanish I'm pretty sure that she said that my tickets had been cancelled. I repeated it in english and she nodded and went on typing furiously. Evenetually the guy on the next desk leaned in and said, 'Your flight's been cancelled' When i aksed why, he simply said 'No pilots' in the same way that you might say, 'we're out of diet coke'. 'Ah,' I said.

Eventually they put me on a flight leaving three hours later.

However the clan were planning to meet me at the airport as their flight was getting in at roughly the same time. I asked if I could call the hotel in Cancun. I was sent to the information desk.

Eventually I spoke to someone who took me into a back office and introduced me to a girl who could make a phonecall for me. I felt bad interrupting her cigarette break (there was a lit cig smouldering away on her keyboard) but she was very nice. Unfortunately I didn't have the number for the hotel. I suggested the internet. This illicited gasps of incredulity, 'We don't have inernet in this office!' Or a phone book or in fact anyway of looking up a number.

So I went to an internet hub and failed to find the website for the hotel. I found a million websites where I could book a room in the hotel, a million places where i could look at pictures. But noone had a freakin number. So I had a brainwave. I'll leave a message with their airline.

So I walked to the international section of the irport. Queued for 40 mins in the check in queue which doubled as a info queue. When I got to the top of the line, I told the gent from American Airlines that I wanted to get a message to American Airlines in Cancun, 'You want to get a message to American Airlines in Cancun?!?!?! That is impossible. How would i do that?' Eventually he recommended that I call them. So I asked for a number for their Cancun office. This resulted in a many more raised eye brows and looks implying I was asking for something entirely unreasonable. Eventually he gave me a number in the states for customer service and I treked back to my airline and queued again for the info desk.

To make a long story short when I eventually got to call AA I got a 'computer says no' response. It is impossible to get messages to people travelling on AA. Under any circumstaces.

So here's my theory. The airline industry survives only because some things just have to be done in person. Attending weddings, diving in the carribean, celebrating xmas with your family. However modern telecommunications, (phone, internet, email, teleconference etc) is making the more mundane, day to day stuff possible without any travel. The airline industry is resisting this by not embracing any of this technology themselves and making it as hard as possible to communicate (even internally!!) with people. Bastards. I bet not a single one of them has a decent internal communications manager.