The Story of Stuff

Something which all of us should be concerned about. Do take about 20 mins to watch this clip.

The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Finally back here in the land of the dry where it's fortunately not as hot as it was.
Things here are still pretty much uneventful, but I guess that's normal for Adelaide...or maybe it's just me.

Anyway, the first thing I noticed when I entered the plane was that it was unnaturally warm, almost as if the aircond wasn't working. True enough, after about 10 minutes the captain announced over the PA that something was wrong with the aircond yet none of them seemed particularly bothered about it. I was hoping it wouldn't be that way for the whole journey because I'd be really unamused having to spend 7 hours in a hot stuffy environment.

Then came the usual prattle about who is flying, where we're going etcetera etcetera. Next was the announcement to watch the safety rules onboard and so we all turned to look at the screen when suddenly the whole plane was thrown into darkness. After a few seconds the emergency lights came on.
I remember being vaguely surprised that there was no MSI incident, instead one could here plenty of "Awwwww"s coming from around.

"Well that's reassuring" I said to the fellow sitting next to me.
"Oh definitely," he replied "Welcome to aeroflop."

After a period of time when nothing seemed to be happening, your fears start taking over - especially after having seen one too many plane disasters on the idiot box and I was fervently hoping that would not come to pass.

Finally the lights and warm aircond returned and the captain apologized for the incident and instructed the cabin crew to demonstrate the safety procedures (cuz all the monitors were still blank). Then we took off...

...when we were at last in the air there was another announcement from the captain. Now he was obviously of a Malay education but the annoying things was that he didn't(couldn't?) pronounce words very well and he spoke way too fast so that all his words sounded joined. It actually took some effort to decipher the English he was speaking. As it turns out he was saying how sorry they were for the blackout earlier because some generator had failed. Then, as if nothing had happened, he went on in a cheery voice that we were still scheduled to be on time, the flight would take 6.5 hours, that they were expecting clear skies but warned us to be alert in case of turbulence etcetera etcetera.

I could only come up with 2 conclusions:
One - these events happen frequently enough that it doesn't bother them
Two - the captain sucks at behavioural skills