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The old Asian woman is wheeled up to the scanner. Then, the ever-patient KLM clerk starts gesturing that she has to stand up. She struggles out of her wheelchair, assisted by someone to either side. Together the three of them manage to lurch forward so that she can stare at the scanner. A minute later and it goes green. She's helped back, to fall into her chair.
Five Hours Earlier.
I wake up early. It's another travel day, my fifth for the year, and my second trip to Europe. I take some time to give Lucy, always alert to my least stirrings, some love, then I wander the house for a while before showering.
By the time I'm ready to go, I decide to take BART in, because it's plenty early, and that'll give me a chance to walk a little before being confined to four square feet for ten hours.
As the BART train swerves toward the Bay, on the elevated tracks leading to SFO, I have one of those increasingly common thoughts: will this be the last time I see this? Because we're leaving from Oakland on January 1, and after that it'll be flights to and from Oakland and San Jose.
Perhaps we'll occasionally be flying through SFO to get to points further on, but I'm not convinced I'll be on that BART track, heading into the airport, ever again.
KLM has wacky computers at SFO. They try to read your passport and don't understand it (even though my passport number is entered with my KLM ticket). It then says that it thinks that I'm going to either Amsterdam or Paris.
UI hint: don't suggest to customers that you don't know where the hell they're going when they're at the airport, and especially don't suggest that you might have some records of them going to a wrong place!
(The reason for the bad UI is soon obvious: KLM is paired up with Air France, and they just have two destinations out of SFO: Amsterdam (that's the KLM part) and Paris (that's the Air France part). So some clever designer thought he'd be cute by listing the only two possible destinations, but said designer clearly knows nothing about interacting with humans. Perhaps it's Jon Snow.)
When I make it to my gate, I explore it and discover pylons for "Boarding Zone 1" and "Boarding Zone 2" and "Boarding Zone 3" and "Boarding Zone 4", all arranged like soldiers at the front of the gate, so that sheep-like Americans, desperate over the fate of their carry-on luggage, can mill about for an hour prior to boarding.
I'm in "Boarding Zone 5", and I have to hunt much harder to find that: the pylon's all the way in the back of the gate area, practically at the next gate.
Apparently "Boarding Zone 5" is the "Screw You" boarding zone. Thanks, KLM.
Boarding is supposed to start at 1.15, and by 1.30 I decide I've had enough of the milling mass of humanity that has not yet boarded. So, I wander back upstairs, where I can stand and look down upon the whole scrum.
And thus I have the best seat in the house when the Donald J. Trump Security Theatre begins.
Because that's about when they announce that Homeland Security, ICE, Border Protection, and probably some other agencies that every good American hates, will be taking biometric scans of everyone leaving on this flight, to ensure that those damned foreigners aren't overstaying their Visas, and have left when they're supposed to.
They begin the torture with the early boarders, including the children and the disabled.
Each one of them is led up to a little kiosk that looks like something out of The Prisoner (or any similar movie or TV show from the '60s, back when people were afraid of fascism, rather than embracing it). They have to present their ticket, then jump back to between some taped-down lines, then wait while their photograph is taken. (A photograph is apparently as much as ICE/CBP/HS can manage for biometrics, thank goodness.) Then either a check mark with green borders come on, and they can advance to the plane, or an "X" with red borders does, and then they have to get in another line.
The camera (because that's all the big scary kiosk is) is non-mobile, because this is clown-car fascism. So parents have to lift their children up. Worse, I watch from my mezzanine seat as several people in wheelchairs are forced to stand up, and more or less propelled to the kiosk.
Clown-car, yes, but definitely evil, evil fascism, starting right off with some cruel discrimination toward the disabled. No surprise: Donald J. Trump openly mocks them.
And it becomes even more clown-car momentarily. Because when KLM starts boarding all of the rich passengers, they open up a second lane. And, whenever there's a line at the identity-theft kiosk, people are pushed over to that other lane, where Donald J. Trump is not stealing your biometric data. People just have their boarding passes scanned normally.
And because the kiosk is abysmally slow, to the point where they'd have to allocate two or three hours to get the whole plane through, at least 9 out of 10 people are pushed to the second lane.
Then the clock turns 1.55, which is when we were supposed to be leaving the gate, and suddenly the kiosk is roped off, and KLM just starts herding everyone through, no questionable biometrics at all.
So I guess Donald J. Trump, reality star and truly shitty leader, managed to find out if 1 in 10 foreigners left the country, which is pretty much not helpful at all.
Maybe it's a trial program, for more extensive civil rights violations in the future. If so: FAIL.
(If it goes through, plan to arrive at your international airport gates an extra 2-3 hours early.)
I do not have my biometrics stolen, because I've duly waited my turn for the Screw-You Boarding Zone 5 to be called. Thanks KLM.
We're done with our boarding about 30 minutes after our take-off time. We're off the ground just under an hour of when our flight was supposed to leave.
Fortunately I have a three-hour layover in Amsterdam, so even with the spectre of fighting through unknown customers and border protections, there's no stress. (Because it's not like I'm going through customs in the USA or anything.)
This time around I've picked a window seat. This is mainly a result of my illness in Hawaii earlier this year. At the time I'd already read the new study saying that planes aren't nearly as filthy as we all thought they were, and that you really only can get sick from people within two seats of you.
(I disagree: I'm pretty sure the sickly children standing in the aisle next to me waiting for the too few bathrooms got me sick, but I digress.)
However, I've now gone back and read the study more, and learned that it also said you were more likely to get sick on the aisle (ding! ding!), and something like five times less likely in the window seat.
Since getting sick in Europe while I was facilitating a workshop would be awful, I've chosen the window.
(I'm like the TSA, I solve the last problem, after it's too late.)
The window seat's not bad. I get to see Marin, Sausalito, Angel Island, the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, Point Pinole, San Pablo Bay, Vallejo, and Benicia out the window before we pass into lands that I'm not familiar with. I then enjoy the unknown landscape for a while before I get bored. (Is that Davis? I wonder. Are those the Sierra-Nevadas? What's that big river running forever through a big canyon?)
And I do have more room. That's always the theory on the aisle, but then every cart going by bangs into you and every antsy passenger brushes against you, waking you if you managed to drift off for five minutes of sleep, and every sickly kid sneezes in your direction. But here I can actually wedge my water bottle to the left of my seat and lean over in that direction.
So, a new theory of air travel? Maybe. Although I hate asking everyone to move when I need to get up and go to the bathroom. Especially when the older woman next to me speaks no English. (Not to complain: I speak no Czech. Well, other than "ano", "ne", "hezky vikend", "dobry rano", "dobry odpolodne", "dikuji", and "diky". Oh, and woman is something like "zena", not quite "xena", but cool.)
Seriously, they drop the house lights at 5pm? Crazy.
Yeah, it's the middle of the night in Amsterdam by now, but no one is on that schedule. Maybe segregating us from the sunlight will help us adjust, I guess. But I can no longer read either of my print books.
(I do try and turn on the light for a moment, but non-English woman next to me glares and starts looking for how to turn off the light, as if were hers, not mine. I ask, "Is it making it hard to see your screen", pointing at the crappy little screen on the back of the seat in front of her. No reply. Cowed, I turn off my light.)
The seats, I should note, are very 20th century. Like, I was very excited the first time I went to England by the fact that there were tee-vees on the back of the seats. These are the same screens, and I mean literally the same screens, ripped out of that Virgin Atlantic jet, not updated, and not accessorized with USB plugs or laptop plugs.
(Hello! KLM! The '90s called and they want their airline seats back!)
So I've very jealously guarding all of my batteries, since they have to last until Amsterdam. (And maybe until Prague on the other side, but I hope not, as that's 3 hours of layover, minus time crossing what's apparently a big airport and going through whatever non-Hellish because it's not US customers, and then an hour-and-a-half of flight on the other side.)
These flights to Europe always feel like Purgatory to me. Especially as the clouds close in below me. Especially as they close up the windows. And suddenly you're just in a long hallway, and the world outside is gone. There's just mist and darkness beyond.
The lights go back on at 10.30pm, California Time (7.30am Central European Time). It's been a five and a half hour night.
Every time I go to Europe, I lose one night's sleep that I never recover. It's just such an extreme change in time zones that there's no getting around it for me. (And it'll be even more extreme once we hit Hawaii, unless we make a longer stop somewhere en route: maybe in San Jose, but possibly the east coast or something instead.) At best, I get an hour's nap, maybe.
Does that make me a day younger?
This time around, because the flight is so early, no one's really been sleeping. But like Pavlovian passengers, everyone leaps up, now ready to stand around the aisles, visit the bathrooms, or just pace.
I think I'll post this when I hit Amsterdam. And from there, we'll call that Day One, since it'll be around 9.30am, and even after I hit Prague it should still only be 2pm or so, leaving me a bit of afternoon after I get to my hotel and then early evening to stay awake.
Christopher says that Saturday, the last day of August, is also the last day of candlelit castle tours. Huh.
Five Hours Earlier.
I wake up early. It's another travel day, my fifth for the year, and my second trip to Europe. I take some time to give Lucy, always alert to my least stirrings, some love, then I wander the house for a while before showering.
By the time I'm ready to go, I decide to take BART in, because it's plenty early, and that'll give me a chance to walk a little before being confined to four square feet for ten hours.
As the BART train swerves toward the Bay, on the elevated tracks leading to SFO, I have one of those increasingly common thoughts: will this be the last time I see this? Because we're leaving from Oakland on January 1, and after that it'll be flights to and from Oakland and San Jose.
Perhaps we'll occasionally be flying through SFO to get to points further on, but I'm not convinced I'll be on that BART track, heading into the airport, ever again.
KLM has wacky computers at SFO. They try to read your passport and don't understand it (even though my passport number is entered with my KLM ticket). It then says that it thinks that I'm going to either Amsterdam or Paris.
UI hint: don't suggest to customers that you don't know where the hell they're going when they're at the airport, and especially don't suggest that you might have some records of them going to a wrong place!
(The reason for the bad UI is soon obvious: KLM is paired up with Air France, and they just have two destinations out of SFO: Amsterdam (that's the KLM part) and Paris (that's the Air France part). So some clever designer thought he'd be cute by listing the only two possible destinations, but said designer clearly knows nothing about interacting with humans. Perhaps it's Jon Snow.)
When I make it to my gate, I explore it and discover pylons for "Boarding Zone 1" and "Boarding Zone 2" and "Boarding Zone 3" and "Boarding Zone 4", all arranged like soldiers at the front of the gate, so that sheep-like Americans, desperate over the fate of their carry-on luggage, can mill about for an hour prior to boarding.
I'm in "Boarding Zone 5", and I have to hunt much harder to find that: the pylon's all the way in the back of the gate area, practically at the next gate.
Apparently "Boarding Zone 5" is the "Screw You" boarding zone. Thanks, KLM.
Boarding is supposed to start at 1.15, and by 1.30 I decide I've had enough of the milling mass of humanity that has not yet boarded. So, I wander back upstairs, where I can stand and look down upon the whole scrum.
And thus I have the best seat in the house when the Donald J. Trump Security Theatre begins.
Because that's about when they announce that Homeland Security, ICE, Border Protection, and probably some other agencies that every good American hates, will be taking biometric scans of everyone leaving on this flight, to ensure that those damned foreigners aren't overstaying their Visas, and have left when they're supposed to.
They begin the torture with the early boarders, including the children and the disabled.
Each one of them is led up to a little kiosk that looks like something out of The Prisoner (or any similar movie or TV show from the '60s, back when people were afraid of fascism, rather than embracing it). They have to present their ticket, then jump back to between some taped-down lines, then wait while their photograph is taken. (A photograph is apparently as much as ICE/CBP/HS can manage for biometrics, thank goodness.) Then either a check mark with green borders come on, and they can advance to the plane, or an "X" with red borders does, and then they have to get in another line.
The camera (because that's all the big scary kiosk is) is non-mobile, because this is clown-car fascism. So parents have to lift their children up. Worse, I watch from my mezzanine seat as several people in wheelchairs are forced to stand up, and more or less propelled to the kiosk.
Clown-car, yes, but definitely evil, evil fascism, starting right off with some cruel discrimination toward the disabled. No surprise: Donald J. Trump openly mocks them.
And it becomes even more clown-car momentarily. Because when KLM starts boarding all of the rich passengers, they open up a second lane. And, whenever there's a line at the identity-theft kiosk, people are pushed over to that other lane, where Donald J. Trump is not stealing your biometric data. People just have their boarding passes scanned normally.
And because the kiosk is abysmally slow, to the point where they'd have to allocate two or three hours to get the whole plane through, at least 9 out of 10 people are pushed to the second lane.
Then the clock turns 1.55, which is when we were supposed to be leaving the gate, and suddenly the kiosk is roped off, and KLM just starts herding everyone through, no questionable biometrics at all.
So I guess Donald J. Trump, reality star and truly shitty leader, managed to find out if 1 in 10 foreigners left the country, which is pretty much not helpful at all.
Maybe it's a trial program, for more extensive civil rights violations in the future. If so: FAIL.
(If it goes through, plan to arrive at your international airport gates an extra 2-3 hours early.)
I do not have my biometrics stolen, because I've duly waited my turn for the Screw-You Boarding Zone 5 to be called. Thanks KLM.
We're done with our boarding about 30 minutes after our take-off time. We're off the ground just under an hour of when our flight was supposed to leave.
Fortunately I have a three-hour layover in Amsterdam, so even with the spectre of fighting through unknown customers and border protections, there's no stress. (Because it's not like I'm going through customs in the USA or anything.)
This time around I've picked a window seat. This is mainly a result of my illness in Hawaii earlier this year. At the time I'd already read the new study saying that planes aren't nearly as filthy as we all thought they were, and that you really only can get sick from people within two seats of you.
(I disagree: I'm pretty sure the sickly children standing in the aisle next to me waiting for the too few bathrooms got me sick, but I digress.)
However, I've now gone back and read the study more, and learned that it also said you were more likely to get sick on the aisle (ding! ding!), and something like five times less likely in the window seat.
Since getting sick in Europe while I was facilitating a workshop would be awful, I've chosen the window.
(I'm like the TSA, I solve the last problem, after it's too late.)
The window seat's not bad. I get to see Marin, Sausalito, Angel Island, the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, Point Pinole, San Pablo Bay, Vallejo, and Benicia out the window before we pass into lands that I'm not familiar with. I then enjoy the unknown landscape for a while before I get bored. (Is that Davis? I wonder. Are those the Sierra-Nevadas? What's that big river running forever through a big canyon?)
And I do have more room. That's always the theory on the aisle, but then every cart going by bangs into you and every antsy passenger brushes against you, waking you if you managed to drift off for five minutes of sleep, and every sickly kid sneezes in your direction. But here I can actually wedge my water bottle to the left of my seat and lean over in that direction.
So, a new theory of air travel? Maybe. Although I hate asking everyone to move when I need to get up and go to the bathroom. Especially when the older woman next to me speaks no English. (Not to complain: I speak no Czech. Well, other than "ano", "ne", "hezky vikend", "dobry rano", "dobry odpolodne", "dikuji", and "diky". Oh, and woman is something like "zena", not quite "xena", but cool.)
Seriously, they drop the house lights at 5pm? Crazy.
Yeah, it's the middle of the night in Amsterdam by now, but no one is on that schedule. Maybe segregating us from the sunlight will help us adjust, I guess. But I can no longer read either of my print books.
(I do try and turn on the light for a moment, but non-English woman next to me glares and starts looking for how to turn off the light, as if were hers, not mine. I ask, "Is it making it hard to see your screen", pointing at the crappy little screen on the back of the seat in front of her. No reply. Cowed, I turn off my light.)
The seats, I should note, are very 20th century. Like, I was very excited the first time I went to England by the fact that there were tee-vees on the back of the seats. These are the same screens, and I mean literally the same screens, ripped out of that Virgin Atlantic jet, not updated, and not accessorized with USB plugs or laptop plugs.
(Hello! KLM! The '90s called and they want their airline seats back!)
So I've very jealously guarding all of my batteries, since they have to last until Amsterdam. (And maybe until Prague on the other side, but I hope not, as that's 3 hours of layover, minus time crossing what's apparently a big airport and going through whatever non-Hellish because it's not US customers, and then an hour-and-a-half of flight on the other side.)
These flights to Europe always feel like Purgatory to me. Especially as the clouds close in below me. Especially as they close up the windows. And suddenly you're just in a long hallway, and the world outside is gone. There's just mist and darkness beyond.
The lights go back on at 10.30pm, California Time (7.30am Central European Time). It's been a five and a half hour night.
Every time I go to Europe, I lose one night's sleep that I never recover. It's just such an extreme change in time zones that there's no getting around it for me. (And it'll be even more extreme once we hit Hawaii, unless we make a longer stop somewhere en route: maybe in San Jose, but possibly the east coast or something instead.) At best, I get an hour's nap, maybe.
Does that make me a day younger?
This time around, because the flight is so early, no one's really been sleeping. But like Pavlovian passengers, everyone leaps up, now ready to stand around the aisles, visit the bathrooms, or just pace.
I think I'll post this when I hit Amsterdam. And from there, we'll call that Day One, since it'll be around 9.30am, and even after I hit Prague it should still only be 2pm or so, leaving me a bit of afternoon after I get to my hotel and then early evening to stay awake.
Christopher says that Saturday, the last day of August, is also the last day of candlelit castle tours. Huh.