let's go shopping maybe then we'll go to a cafe ...

I thought it might be super original and cool if, because I'm going to write about going to London, that I would call this blog post "Well I just touched down in London town". I didn't in the end because when I searched for that line to see what song it was from (heard it on the radio at some point I guess), it turns out that almost every single other person in the world has used that tactic (naming their blog post or blog after that song lyric) and it wasn't original at all anymore and also I listened to the song and didn't really love it but since I still wanted to go with the idea I just took another line from the same song and it sort of in a way fit what will be the theme and so that concludes my explanation of the title.

As another prelude, I would like to point out that what follows is a true story where I have not even really embellished (or at least don't plan to as I'm writing this prelude before having written the core content of the post). No names of people, places, or companies have been changed to protect the innocent/guilty. And I'm totally serious on that.

Wednesday morning I rose early to make it to Franz Josef Strauss for my 7am takeoff to London. Had some meetings at the London office, don't ya know, and impressed them with my brilliance (ok so maybe there is a little bit of truth-stretching). Nothing too memorable to report. About 4:30 I was Kings Cross-bound for the next train to Cambridge. Thursday and Friday encompassed a training course in the Microsoft-backed functional programming language F# (pronounced like the music note) and "Data Science with F#". Good course but spent a good deal of time with a BBC live video Olympic feed window open. Thursday night after the course my colleague and I set off to find a pub that would show the Canada-Norway hockey game. It took a little longer than it should have but eventually we found the (seemingly single) pub in Cambridge that would show the game and settled in to a British meal with some ice hockey on the telly. Our table neighbour just so happened to be a fellow Canuck who had moved to Cambridge less than a week prior to this occasion and we reminisced about the frozen wastelands of the New Country as we enjoyed the disaster of "only" beating Norway by a handful of goals.

Friday after the course I was train-bound again to race back to London... to catch the next hockey game in my hotel. This one (as you know) we won a little more convincingly and after the hockey and some speed skating (if I remember correctly), I was off to meet up with my Estonian friend -- a User Experience expert -- from my halcyon days at the University of Leeds where we had a Valentine's Evening dinner date. You can't make this stuff up.

Saturday was mine to experience London Fashion Week as my flight was not scheduled to depart until 8pm. I found what the Internet coffee snobs consider to be London's finest and was thoroughly impressed. I enjoyed "fast-food" sushi near Hyde Park with one of the most multi-cultural crowds I've ever been immersed in. I tried strolling through Hyde Park but the 60+km/h wind gusts made that difficult. I browsed in some book shops and laid down a few quid here and there. Sorry this story is pretty boring but hold tight and we're getting to the good stuff soon.

Around 4pm I met up again with my friend for a snack and a drink before my Heathrow Express train to the airport and to then head back to the continent. I was a little nervous and experienced some moments of panic as I nearly missed the already "cutting things a little close" train but my rushing paid off and I was off to freedom with plenty of time to spare. Being the clever young chap that I am, I had only carry-on bags with me and sub-consciously patted myself on the back as I sauntered to the check-in machine, passport in hand. I scanned said document, input my booking reference, and was off to the rac..... what's this? "We could not process your booking. Please bring this card to the flight management desk." Weird...

I arrived to the "Flight Management Desk" which is a corner of London Heathrow that never quite made it out of the third world. Chaos reigns. There are no queues, no instructions, and panic is everywhere around you and all about. At this point I naïvely believed that this silly little misunderstanding would be quickly sorted out and I'd be on my way back to the land where 1L beers are a breakfast food. I do admit, however, that I was feeling a little bit of the butterflies as at this moment it was just past 7pm and my flight was scheduled to depart at 8.

I finally shove my way up to the counter and hand over my piece of paper. By this point I've half-figured out that this is where flight plans go to die and from conversations that I've heard around me it seems that British Airways -- that's B-R-I-T-I-S-H -space- A-I-R-W-A-Y-S -- has a keen knack for overbooking flights. The lady tells me that my flight has been overbooked and that I should go for a walk and come back to the counter in 20 minutes. I oblige, take in my BA-imposed light exercise, and return to the airport mad house corner. Every now and then you hear shouts: "Passenger Smith? Ryan Smith to Moscow? Smith to Moscow?"; "Who had Beirut? Anyone? Beirut"; "Janice!?!?!? Do you have Nice down there?"; etc. I wait another 10 minutes and by this time it would be a miracle if I made my flight. I'm jostling to get to the front when down the way I hear the tiniest whisper that -- though my mind just may be playing tricks -- sounds something like my name.

I head down the way and ask a desk-lady if she called my name. And I swear this part happened exactly as told:

Me: "I think I might have heard my name being called down here"
Her: "What's your name?"
Me: "Darling"
Her: "Seriously, what's your name?"
Me: "Seriously, it's Darling"
Her: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA...

Not very polite, especially for a Brit! Anyways, she says that she definitely didn't call that name, but a kid a couple of counters over says "I heard your name!; it was either him or her" and points down the way a little more. I go over, force my way to the front and ask if they called my name. She says "yes, sorry you didn't make it on the flight; it's overbooked". D'oh!

So this isn't really the end of the world. The first thing she says is: "do you need a hotel?" and I answer "I don't know, do I?". The answer is yes because the next flight is the next morning at 7am. So, I, along with two other women who didn't make it on to the Munich flight, get hotel vouchers, dinner vouchers, transportation vouchers, breakfast vouchers, and first-class already-checked-in boarding passes for tomorrow morning's flight. We then get ushered to another desk where it's the man who deals with compensation. Since we were supposed to arrive in Munich at 11:15 PM but instead we'll arrive the following day at 9:15 AM we are held back by 10 hours and by their calculations that comes to a cash card with a value of 250 euros. Fair enough, I guess, but I would have preferred a free flight anywhere BA travels.

Me and my new hangers-on finish up with Mr. Compensation Guy and head down to where the shuttle bus will take us to the lovely Premier Inn on Bath Road. We get to the hotel shuttle bus area and if you thought that the Flight Management Desk area was a jungle, this bus area was the Amazon. When the pandemonium greets us I jokingly (but so, so unfortunately, foreshadow-ingly) say "now watch the hotel will be overbooked"...

The bus finally comes and we, along with several other people going to several hotels all scattered around Heathrow presumably because the evil airline corporations play statistics fast and loose with our lives, hop on to a promised warm bed and warm meal at the other end. Our Premier Inn finally arrives and us 3 new buddies along with about 10-15 other people disembark. As we do so, a man that I recognize from the earlier gong show at Flight Management says to the driver "the hotel is full". I kind of hope and kind of try to convince myself (though I know it's futile) that he's joking. It's clear that he's not for a number of reasons but mostly the fact that this does not look like a man who jokes. But it seems that everyone wants to not believe it so much that we, I guess, pretend to not hear it and go to the check-in desk. The first people to step up to the desk start conversing with the hotel people and sure enough, the hotel is full. A huge family of 20 barges in front of us and a raging argument breaks out between them and the hotel staff who really can't be blamed for any of this but angry, tired, stressed people need to have someone to yell at and so right now it's them. Phone calls go back and forth between BA and the hotel, and they find another hotel for us. Amazingly, the bus driver has stuck around (even though I'm sure it wasn't in his job description) and he is happy to drive us all to the next hotel.

We arrive just after 10pm and, of course, although there are rooms for all of us, the kitchen is closed because it's after 10pm. However, the staff really (sort of) come through on this one and they put together a buffet of just pathetically awful food so that we have something. On the one hand, it's nice that they did that because I'm sure they weren't required to in any way. On the other hand, if they didn't, that same rude family that pushed their way in front of us would have bitten their heads off I'm sure if they hadn't done anything so I guess they just chose the option that looked better at the time.

I finally got to bed just after 11 and just after placing a wake-up call for 4am since the shuttle buses only come every hour that early in the morning and the later one would be too late to make the 7am flight. Things go fine, I make it home, and I think: I'm just going to get this over with and withdraw all the cash from my BA "compensation". Both fortunately and unfortunately, things work out like this: I go to the bank machine, follow the instructions they gave me, and: "transaction not authorized; contact your card issuer". SON OF A BITCH! So the reason I say fortunately and unfortunately is because this was great for the story but it would have just been awful to have this thing drag on and have to call BA and try to figure out what the F was going on. However, then I remembered that BA is British, after all, and the guy I think was just estimating when he made the conversion from pounds to euros, and either he rounded up a little too high or maybe this bank is just giving me a poor conversion rate. So, I head back to the machine, try 240... same thing. Then I try 230... Cha-Ching! So, a little less than what they told me, but in the end I'd probably do it all again for 230 smackeroos... Maybe...

How The Tannoys Eventually Achieved World Peace

Mr. Tannoy is quite pleased with himself that his little loud-speaker company -- started on the side in his college dorm room thirty years ago -- not only became his full time job years back but has now taken the lead in the ruthless hi-fi speaker market segment that in turn has made him and his wife, by extension, fabulously wealthy and in general able to satisfy any whim and/or desire that might find its way into their collective minds. The idea of kids came and went as Mrs. Tannoy was never so hot on the idea as she imagined that it would only bring back grim memories of her less than jubilant childhood when she was essentially forced, along with her younger sister, to care for her abandoned-by-husband, unfortunately disabled, and severely pain-killer-addicted mother who was a sorry case even before the abandonment and the disablement and the addiction which all happened not in that order but were all tightly coupled in a short window of time which led directly to the unfortunate childhood that now psychologically prevented her from having children of her own. This initially presented no problem of any kind to Mr. Tannoy as he was, and always had been as far back as can remember, interested primarily in three, and only three, areas: (1) building kick-ass speakers; (2) building kick-ass speakers; and (3) building kick-ass speakers. The problem is that now that his speakers are so good and so kick-ass, he has little to strive for anymore. And so he kind of wants to have some kids.

Tannoys

In the early 90's when he single-handedly invented reverse-deep-attenuating-split-frequency-light-induced-anti-modulation, the incredible increase in loud-speaker quality was so pronounced that the sheer sound was so infinitely better than any competitor for a number of years that no self-respecting audiophile could be caught dead without at least a pair of Tannoys somewhere around the house. When the competition finally had some semblance of an answer somewhere around '96, Mr. Tannoy was already well on to the next-next thing in speaker technology. When one afternoon in the Fall of 95 he stumbled in his basement lab across a little idea known as triple-attenuated-reverbial-double-split-coaxial-fibre-based-tone-boosting, it took him less than six months to turn the speaker world upside down for another time and literally obliterate any hint of competition in the high-end segment for another five years. Thanks to industrial espionage, the corrupt US patent system, and probably the Russians (though he's not 100% convinced on the latter), the competing speaker makers finally chanced upon a technology that by no means equaled but at least finally gave consumers a choice if they wanted a different aesthetic (but why would you?) the amazing kick-ass sound quality available in a Tannoy.

And so, as he had done on two previous occasions, Mr. Tannoy would again come to re-invent the world of high fidelity audio when in 2001 he invented not a new breakthrough in sound quality, but something never imagined before in home or industrial electronics: an enclosure and speaker system that was invisible and that weighed nothing. The Tannoy Phantoms* were like nothing ever seen before not only in the home-audio market, or the electronics industry, or really any other industry in recorded human history: everyone had to have a pair of Tannoy Phantoms as it solved so many problems. No cables, no space loss, no having to sacrifice the fullest sound possible because the room can't quite handle floor-to-ceilings (a speaker term), no downside at all. Well, to be fair, at first the purists weren't at all convinced. Somehow Mr. Tannoy had achieved a speaker set that was essentially invisible and took up no space at all -- of any kind -- but that still produced the best sound-reproduction product that money could buy, but a stereo system just didn't look like a proper stereo system without a beautiful pair of wood-encased Tannoys framing it. What finally convinced them (the purists, that is) was the inclusion (thought up by employee #2 at Tannoy, Mrs. Tannoy) was a Tannoy name-plate, essentially, that you put beside your stereo system to make sure that all of your guests knew exactly what kind of speakers you were sporting (it was a little strange that it took this for them to be swayed because even the least-refined trash-pop-listening-pre-teen raised on iPods and cheap earbuds could tell after a single note when Tannoys were in play because they're just such a damned good product and listening experience).

Tannoy Phantoms in front of a grey wall

And so Mr. Tannoy is pleased, but he is bored. The loud-speaker market is literally locked-up tight and most of the competition has full-on given up. While minisculaly pleasing, but ultimately somewhat depressing, Mr. Tannoy's former idols Castle Speakers have even recently thrown in the towel, laid off all of their audio engineers, and turned their UK-based factory into an indoor paint ball arena for loathsome 13-year-old boys getting rage out at birthday parties. His speakers are invisible, they take up no space, and most importantly of all to him -- what has driven his passion for loud-speakers for all of these years -- is that they sound perfect. Literally, in every sense of the word: perfect. It would be a contradiction of the laws of physics for a speaker to sound any Planck-limit-defined delta, iota, smidgen, or any of those teeny-tinily-imagined amounts better. So what more can he do, and what more is there in life?

Each day, Mr. Tannoy wakes up in his 50 million pound (weight and currency) mansion on the shore of Grasmere Lake in the Lake District of North-West England. He walks downstairs, his sensor-aware "smart"-house knows he's awake, fires up the stereo, and begins -- through the magic of pervasive-surveillance and machine learning -- to play exactly the best possible choice of music for him at that very moment to achieve a maximally-optimal state of musically-incuded happiness. The musical reproduction is A-one, of course. He sits at his kitchen table and eats his favourite breakfast: disgustingly-prepared bacon the way British people like it, along with equally disgusting brown sauce the way British people like it (though of course it's not disgusting to him because he's British if you haven't figured that out yet. Hint: his name is Mr. Tannoy). As he is enjoying his bacon and brown sauce sandwich, Mrs. Tannoy joins him. He thinks about how bored he is and how much fun it would be to either push loud-speaker quality a little further (physically impossible as we've just discussed) or maybe to raise some kids.

Just then, Mrs. Tannoy, after taking a "bite" of her morning Appletini, announces that she got over all that stuff about her childhood when she was listening to this amazing version of Cat's in the Cradle reproduced immaculately by a pair of Tannoy Phantoms in the backyard during her morning swim and so she wanted to have kids. They go upstairs, the house AI comes up with the perfectly machine-learned mood music for optimally creating a baby, and nine months later out pops little Nigel (remember, they're British). Then they live happily ever after and Nigel wants to become a sound engineer just like his famous Dad but there's really nothing left to do in sound engineering so he instead takes on the problem of over-population and disease and he cures both but then he gets bored since both those things are solved so him and his wife Kate (like most British girls born post-2010 or so she's named Kate) have kids to help them not be so bored and that kid grows up to solve the whole non-world-peace problem and then everyone's truly happy because he also came up with something that makes it impossible to ever be bored and that's called a Bicycle. It turns out it already existed but people forgot about them around the start of the 21st century because everyone became so enthralled with listening to their invisible speakers that sounded oh-so-good that they forgot that bikes existed and so no one rode them anymore and that's probably why people got so bored in the first place but if they hadn't then all this other stuff wouldn't have happened and the world would have ended because of over-population and disease and we wouldn't have bikes anyways.

* Having amassed a veritable fortune from his speaker empire and not being able to imagine a name other than the Tannoy Phantoms, when the Rolls Royce Motor Company came threatening to sue Mr. Tannoy and the rest of his 2-person conglomerate for the (as they argued) infringing use of the name "Phantom", Mr. Tannoy could do nothing but hire the highest-priced lawyers he could find and echo former President George W. Bush when he was quoted by numerous news sources as not only referring to Rolls Royce and its executives as "terrorists", but urging them and their lawyers to "bring it on". Mr. Tannoy expended many millions of pounds but eventually won the right (out of court) to go ahead with the Phantom brand name.