London City Airport

What is it about airports that turns quite normal people into frantic stress bunnies?

Take the pick up area at Manchester Airport's Terminal 3, it doesn't matter what time of the day or night it is, there will always be people driving like maniacs, cutting between lanes, pulling up on the hard shoulder of the feeder roads and stopping in the middle of the road to drop of passengers.

The other week, when I had gone through to pick up Dave, I actually saw a woman driving through the pick up area with the boot of her people carrier wide open and her husband (I guess) running after the car trying to grab his case out of the back - madness.

At London City Airport yesterday there was a queue to get through the security area and I watched as a grown woman was panicking to get her coat off, her laptop out of her bag and untie her shoes at the same time as her husband. Quite why this had to be co-ordinated I don't know but she was determined that the blue tray with his stuff in should follow her tray through the xray machine. She was getting more and more agitated as other people were putting their trays down and looked ready to stab me in the eye when I put my carry-on bag between their trays to go through the machine (OK I did it deliberately to watch her reaction)

She was muttering away in German, probably putting a curse on me and all my offspring, while her husband, for no obvious reason other than acting like a two year old, gave his tray and extra shove through the machine before stomping off through the metal detector. Then their plans for blue tray efficiency were well and truly scuppered when the alarms went off and he was taken to one side by the security staff. I thought his wife was going to explode, how dare they, her look said, this wasn't part of the plan, she had scheduled 1.5 mins to get through security and now they were going to be 5 mins behind. The fact that they still had well over an hour until their flight was to be called was irrelevant - madness - at airports all common sense seems to fly out with the planes!

Coffeetastic

Overheard the other day in Costa Coffee

'The Gingerbread Latte - does it come in skinny? Yes? OK, I'll have a regular skinny decaf gingerbread latte'

I'm sorry but that's not a beverage, it's a short story!

People Watching in Canary Wharf

Canary Wharf Security or the Thought Police as I like to think of them, might want to reconsider their choice of canine partners. To be really scary you need a dog only one gene removed from a wolf, an Alsation for example. To me a black Labrador just sends out the wrong message - not so much fear me, I will rip your arm off if you come too close, as come up and tickle my belly 'cose I'm a big softy.




See the guy in the red fleece and baseball cap? His job is to empty the bins. All day he wanders around looking in the rubbish bins and soon as anybody drops something into one of them he wips it out and takes it to a big dumpster that is cunningly hidden away from the main square. I was sitting watching him and wondering how much job satisfaction can he possibly get but then I a saw that he was smiling and singing away to himself unlike the guy in the next picture -

Just how pissed off does he look? So what's his story? My guess is that he has the boss from hell. You know the type, the youngest boss in the company, slim, good looking, three years out of University and knows everything. This poor sap has probably been nagged all morning by the boy genius, work harder, think stratigically, be at your desk ready to work by 8 o'clock and don't expect to leave before I do ------or maybe he's just had a row with his personal trainer.

Lunch time in Canary Wharf

What does the dynamic young City worker do in their lunch break when the sun is shining on Canary Wharf? The really lucky ones will have arranged a business lunch and then they can sit at on a proper seat at a proper table and enjoy lunch at a posh eatery like Smollensky's or Carluccios, on expenses naturally.

And providing there isn't a gale blowing through the docks the rest will look for somewhere to sit and eat their posh butties. Any where will do, you can find them sitting on walls and benches or even bum numbing stone seats.
Otherwise they stand around talking on their mobiles and have a crafty drag on their third cigarette of the day.