Guy Gadney versus the volcano – part 2: Travels with my iPad
In this guest posting, AIMIA president Guy Gadney continues his attempt to get back to Australia.
The global company Power Gen has offices in many countries and it localises its websites into different territory. Each local site has its own domain name, thus powergenuk, powergenfrance, and the unfortunately elided powergenitalia.
Guy Gadney's iPad lets the train take the strain
Gazing out of the train to Florence and thinking of this made me laugh out loud. So much so that the people sitting around me all gave weird looks. I got back to playing Flight Control on the iPad.
The volcano had now closed Paris airport and the cloud was expanding east and south. Yet the story was slipping down to second or even third position on the Guardian website. Being in the midst of this, I can see the chaos that is building. With each day that goes by around 17,000 people get bumped from their booked flights and join the queue of people wanting to get home. There is a set number of allocated flights that airports can handle every day. So for every day that goes by, the problem grows. As I reach a score of 78 on Flight Control, I realise what dire problems would occur if too many planes were to appear at an airport simultaneously. Especially if I was an air traffic controller.
Guy Gadney's iPad enjoys Cafe Vivoli in Florence
I change trains for the fourth time at a town called La Spezia for the final leg to Florence. On the platform are a young American couple on their honeymoon. They look at my lack of rucksack and ask me what I am doing travelling through Italy. “Escaping the volcano cloud” I say. They look at me strangely and start to move away. “But…but…haven’t you heard about the volcano?” They say this is the first they have heard of it as they do not speak Italian so only watch MTV. Even when the apocalypse arrives, there will be people whose last image as the world burns will be the latest Lady Gaga duet. Not a bad image, come to think about it.
Florence railway station is buzzing at rush hour. I have been on trains now for 10 hours and offline for the same amount of time. The cab driver understands my elementary Italian – a combination of Spanish, French and Super Mario Bros.
Guy Gadney's iPad enjoys the bathroom products in Florence
The cab winds its way out of Florence up to the small hillside town of Fiesole, arriving up the crunching gravel driveway of the Villa San Michele as the sunset over the golden domes of Florence. I smell of trains, of other peoples’ perfume, of airbrakes and oil, of Albanian labourers, dogs, cigar smoke and faulty air-conditioning. Whatever. I am in need of a weekend of rest, and have just arrived in a 16th century converted monastery where the staff call me Mr Guy, where there is a heated outdoor pool, unlimited prosecco, Molton Brown bathroom accessories and ethernet into the room.
The next morning I wake up to an email from EasyJet. “A volcanic eruption in Iceland is pumping clouds of volcanic ash into the atmosphere. We are very sorry but your flights have had to be cancelled due to the risk from volcanic ash”. I top up the bath with Prosecco and forget about the world.
Meanwhile, in the outside world, a clock has started ticking. It is Saturday and my Qantas flight is due to leave on Wednesday at midday to go back to Sydney. I am missing my partner and my 17-month-old son. My seat at the dinner table in Sydney has been filled by a laptop running a Skype video call for 10 days. When he reaches out to daddy, he hits the space bar. The chilled Zen approach is starting to wear off, and I do not want to have that flight cancelled.
Aside from catching up with my sister’s family, there is an option of hitching a lift with them from Florence to London via private jet. At a time where flexibility is the answer, hopping onto a Netjet flight at any point we want seems like a genius idea. This is a world where the pilot turns around and asks if you are ready to take off, and where the seats not only go forward and back, but can rotate as well. It’s like dodgems on rails at 30,000ft.
Unfortunately, jets are airplanes just like any other jet plane, and on Saturday afternoon the managing director of Netjet sent out the totally responsible but galling email that they had cancelled all flights and were not taking any bookings for a week. Over dinner, we decided to drive back from Florence to London, and try to get a berth on the car-train through the Channel Tunnel.
Three adults, two kids. Two laptops loaded with games, two iPhones, one iPod touch and an iPad. A drive through four countries with the appropriately celebratory goal of reaching Reims, the capital of Champagne.
It is 8am and we crunch down the driveway and through madly narrow Italian roads as the fog lifts from in between the vines around Florence. Overnight, Florence airport has been closed, eastern European airspace has closed down, and Spain has been added to the list of affected countries. The cost to British Airways has been quoted as 130m pounds per day.
While the short-term impact of the volcano has been air travellers, there will be a rapidly increasing impact on other sectors as international deliveries are cut off completely. Flowers from Holland, international courier deliveries including my Amazon orders, Ebay purchases. The loss of trade is much larger than just airlines.
We also do not know the health impact of this cloud. I cannot believe that the health ministers are publicly saying that when tonnes of invisible particles of volcanic glass and lava descend back to the ground it will not have an impact on our health, as well as livestock and crops. While I am not holding my breath about making my flight back to Sydney on Wednesday, I feel that holding my breath is exactly what we should be doing normally. Should we be wearing masks?
We power-drive through Europe in shifts. Through northern Italy and into Switzerland. We hear that there are traffic snarls through the motorways of central France. We thank the satnav gods for directing us through Switzerland. It is raining and the mountains are steep and sharp. They are impressive but are dark, jagged and not alive with the sound of music. It is a relief to be in the long tunnels, even the claustrophobic 15-kilometre Gottardo tunnel. There are moments of stationary traffic through tollgates and borders, but nothing we cannot make up on the open freeways.
As we re-enter France, the kids have exhausted two iPhones. The iPad is holding up admirably. The kids are playing Doodlejump, Bondi Rescue, Sally’s Spa and Jungle Crash. I have got them testing the latest version of the Project Factory’s new iPhone game called Scratch and got great feedback. As the iPad dies, I bring out the secret weapon of a PSP and we buy a car charger for the various Apple devices.
My filmmaker brother-in-law has never seen so many gadgets in one place and I sense that there is mild sense of worry about what all these games may be doing to their imagination and sociability. Naturally, I think it’s a good part of their development, and anyway it keeps the car atmosphere positive and fun. I have called myself the Arcade Manager.
Guy Gadney's iPad enjoys a hard-earned rest
We arrive in Reims around 10pm. The hotel is gorgeous and we tuck straight into champagne and a coq au vin. I locate all the power sockets in my room and start what my 8-year-old niece calls “The Holy Rechargingness” in preparation for the journey tomorrow. The iPad sleeps well.
It is early on Monday morning. A week ago, I had a full day of meetings with clients, partners and potential investors in London. These have all been shunted and we are now en route to Calais. The newspaper headlines are talking about five days of airspace closure. I post a Facebook update giving odds of 3:1 against Qantas opening flights by Wednesday.
As we leave the hotel, the concierge tells us that a number of people arrived late into the night having got snarled up in the traffic from Italy to France. There is no sense of triumphalism that we avoided it, merely an acknowledgement that we need to get going to meet the booking time across the Channel.
Close to Calais, we pass a taxi packed with suitcases with Lisbon number plates. Lisbon! I look through the windows and see an unshaven taxi driver looking a bit like Saddam Hussein did when he was caught by the Americans. This will have been the fare of his life. Later at Calais, I bump into the taxi again and talk to the occupants. They paid 2,200 pounds for the journey. “We just needed to get home”, they say. They have not shaved for a couple of days and look exhausted. As the cab driver leaves, I watch him pause at the first roundabout as if taking a deep breath before starting back to Portugal.
I call Flight Centre in Sydney and start to plan the other options. As this stage, these boil down to a single decision about whether to stick within the system and trust it, or break out and go freelance. Sticking within the system will involve waiting in London for the airways to clear, for the booking systems to unclog, and rolling dice about when my flight will be rebooked. The advantage here is to accelerate our plans to expand The Project Factory into the UK and reschedule the meetings. Freelance will involve taking a train to Athens or another southern European city, and aiming to get a flight from there. This should get me back to family and all the booked pitches and projects closer to schedule.
Dear reader, at this point you know as much as I do. The next step is up to you. Let me know what you would do, and let’s take it from here together.
- G
uy Gadney is a director of The Project Factory and was at the MIPTV television conference in Cannes as part of the Digital VIP summit. You can read the first part of his adventures here
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Really enjoying this series. Thanks for posting, Tim.
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An impressive retelling of a skilled communicator. The highlight “The holyrecharginess”. If it was me, I’d ditch any notions of freelancing and remember what Karen Blixen (AKA Merryl Streep) said in “Out of Africa” – “Let it go, let it go. This water lives in Mombassa anyhow.”
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>We also do not know the health impact of this cloud. I cannot believe that the health ministers are publicly saying that when tonnes of invisible particles of volcanic glass and lava descend back to the ground it will not have an impact on our health, as well as livestock and crops. While I am not holding my breath about making my flight back to Sydney on Wednesday, I feel that holding my breath is exactly what we should be doing normally. Should we be wearing masks?
Has anyone else dug out their copy of Nevil Shute’s “On The Beach”?
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Sticking around in London would probably be the sensible option but Travels With My iPad will be far more entertaining if he carries on freelancing.
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Forget fridge magnets and substitute with a bottle of Prosecco. I had a wonderful week in Fiesole many years ago – gotta love those italians!
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The universe is telling you to go with the expansion option I reckon.
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Guy – the whole journey was worth it for the discovery of the Italian telehone company: a bit like when Exxon wanted to go worldwide with that name, did exhaustive searches to make sure it wasn’t in use anywhere else and then, so the story goes, got sued for appropriating their name by a small pornographic cinema in N London. If there had been time for a poetic thought (not daunte-d on the spell correct), La Spezia has a monument that says, quite simply:: Lord Byron / Noted English Swimmer and Poet. Now there’s one way of getting home. Trust you have made it by now. London having been sunny whilst you were here has gone wet and rainy and there are many of us taking immense joy in not running the Marathon today. Warm regards as ever. Paul.
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