Frankenblog Musik Messe 2008 (pt1)

Monday 10/03/08

Wake up to one of the biggest storms that has hit UK in past few years. Winds gusting to 80mph combine with Spring Tides and torrential rain to batter the west coast of the country. Get a lift to meet Chris Hinds, European Market Manager, to travel to City Airport for the flight to Frankfurt for a 7.30am check in. City is a small airport in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, all planes are small but so are the queues in theory.
Approach City Airport to see a small private jet trying to land in very strong gusting winds – looks like we might be in for a bumpy ride. Get to terminal building to find chaos. People everyone on mobile phones trying to find out what is going up. Boards have “Indefinite Delay” displayed next to every flight. We ask at our airline desk what this means, they change it to “Cancelled”. Then we queue up for 40mins to get transferred to another flight. In the meantime both Chris and I contac the airline to try to rearrange our lives – I am told confidently by a call centre worker that the Plane I have just been thrown off is not cancelled. When I cast doubt on this answer the answer comes back “ I have checked on the internet and that plane is leaving on time” – so there you see the power of the internet, it has created a completely separate reality!

Find out we are on a mid morning flight from Heathrow (so much for avoiding the queues!) and are put in a cab across the city. I mention that its Chris’ birthday and we get the black cab to ourselves. Chris get’s an impromptu present of a tour of the sight of London (Tower Bridge, Tower of London, Trafalgar Sq, Buckingham Palace, the M4 etc)

Arrive Heathrow Terminal 2 to find out that the chaos of city airport is repeated here on a much grander scale. Find out Martin Reid, our Marketing Director, is on the same flight as us now. We join queue and when we find out that there are no planes join another queue. When asked why by a young woman we reply “this queue looks shorter and we’ve nothing better to do” – she queue happily behind us. We get to front of the queue to find we need to queue elsewhere. Now its around 11.00am and the flight we were supposed to be catching hasn’t even left Frankfurt yet. Martin appears to have got on the first plane out of Heathrow and will be the first Turbosound rep in Frankfurt. Will be the only one? Another colleague, Paul McMullen (UK Market Manager), sounds to be in an even worse position, in a different terminal with another airline. So far Frankfurt is looking like a bit of a disaster. We bump into some industry colleagues from other pro-audio companies so we don’t feel quite so bad about it all.

Eventually we get checked in, eventually we get through security, eventually we get a seat for something to eat only to be called to the gate. There we sit for another 30 mins before boarding the plane so we can sit there whilst another storm passes overhead. Plane finally leaves around 3pm, and after a somewhat bumpy flight we land in Frankfurt trudge through the world’s most confusing terminal to wait for our bags and get a cab to hotel to check in and drop off our bags. Then we find we can get the tram from hotel to Messe – there is no queue and no delay!

Arrive in Halle 8.0 and find our stand. Its now 6.30pm and we’re about 7 hours late. Still stand is looking pretty good – the Aspect cluster and the new FlexArray hang are both flown. We put in a couple of hours unpacking, positioning and labelling products, then head to our favourite Italian restaurant for something to eat, and a decent bottle of Vino Rosso to celebrate Chris’ Birthday. Paul finally arrives at the hotel after midnight over 10 hours late bizarrely with one of our R&D engineers, Danny Cooklin, who was supposed to be flying from Southampton.