Heathrow, sucks and then II

Talking about Heathrow (previously), I just read this October 4th Boing-Boing entry about that very same airport. Hey, lets share that pain when flying via Heathrow!

The lines are like something out of the ninth pit of hell, especially in the Virgin terminal, and the rules about carry-ons and so forth keep getting more and more inhospitable.

It’s those rules about the carry-ons that got me pissed off too: I had a laptop bag on my back and a camera bag on my shoulder and was tagged by security personnel, who told me that I had to put the small bag in the laptop bag. Obviously, the camera bag didn’t fit in the laptop bag. However, I was able to strap the camera bag on one side of the laptop bag and eventually made it back in the slow moving crowd.

I have nicknamed it “The George Orwell Theme Park” because of that horrible, horrible security queue.

Queue? It’s queues. The only entertaining parts of these queues are the ‘Guess What Laptop I have’-game and ‘Guess what nation I come from’-game, that is, whenever people took out their laptops out of the bags or their passports out of their pockets (this is also where I discovered that most Canadians apparently were into Toshiba laptops)

December 2006: Passengers forced to queue outside in tents in freezing conditions after dense fog grounded 40% of all flights [ed. this is from the link mentioned below].

I think I mentioned before that when I flew back to Holland, there were already doubts if my connecting flight was actually going to take off or not: It was a couple of days before Christmas, and Heathrow was in a lock down because of heavy fog. I was told I probably had to prepare myself for a run or an ‘airport stay-over’. The moment I landed on Heathrow, all I remember seeing was an airport in chaos, line-ups and people running around trying to catch their last flight(s) to Continental Europe.

Back to that Boing-Boing posting: I see that the British Competition Commission has warned the (Spanish) operator of Heathrow to do something about the unacceptable delays because of long security lineups. For some kind of reason it comforts me that I wasn’t the only person going through pains to make it to my connecting flight.