I manage to sleep as long a possible today, it is going to be a long night flying through to London. I head down to breakfast around 11am. I have packed everything, and I am pretty much ready to go. After a meal I think I'll try for a bit more of a lie down, I don’t need to be at the airport until 2pm. By 1.30pm I am leaving my room and checking out. The shuttle back to the airport only take a few minutes and I am checking into the flight around 2pm. The question is will I get on. This time not so lucky as to get a boarding pass straight away. I am told to come back around 3.30pm and they will tell me if I am on or not. I decided to just take a seat by checkin, not much point in going too far with all my bags. There are a few other people also hanging around, this is not a good sign. After a few minutes I get talking to some of them to find there are 15 staff on standby for this flight. Oh man this is not good!!!
It turns out that most of the people on standby got bumped from yesterdays flight. Air Canada had put 20 of their passengers on the AirNZ flight and used up all the seats, so they were all left behind. I am the newbie to this party of staff flyers. I got to hear all their stories from the past 24 hours, and who worked at Air NZ who didn’t, what their connections where, and we where having a lot of fun telling travel stories, it really did make the time pass. One of the ladies, phoned back to the office in NZ to find out what the story was, it turns out there are only 14 seats and 15 people. We start to wish for people getting stuck in traffic at this point. By 3:40pm people are beginning to stress, “this isn’t a good sign”, I’m going on about the power of positive thinking, saying they are just taking their time getting out seats in order and so on. By 3:45pm we are all called to the counters, we are all on, there where a lot of very happy faces, that is for sure.
London here we come!!!
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