Execution – Poissy
Please take a moment to download and read my file Fully Funded Public Transit .
Tuesday, September 06, 2016
I am off to Poissy. My flight leaves around seven in the evening so, at four in the morning I am wide-awake, more excited than a ten-year old who has been promised a trip to the seaside. My bucket and spade and brightly-coloured flags are all packed and waiting by the door.
My checklist has been reviewed several times. My bag has been packed, weighed, unpacked and packed again.
I twiddle my thumbs. The fridge is emptied except for a few carrots and apples. This would be a good time to head off to Fran’s – open 24 hours a day – for breakfast.
Why Poissy?
Poissy is a mid-size town in the department of Yvelines, in the Ilê de France. It boasts thirty bus-lines (destinations marked in yellow), which means that when I feel like it (a rainy day, perhaps) I can hop on a bus and sight-see.
I figure to find myself a decent café for breakfast and become known to the wait staff, and a decent brasserie or restaurant for the evening meal. I might sit each morning and evening and take my time translating Le Monde with my pocket dictionary.
Poissy has an old-town air on two of its long, winding narrow central streets.
And Poissy lies on the RER line that passes through the heart of Paris. Admittedly it is a spur line – not the main RER line to Cergy-Le-Haut, so trains are probably only every quarter hour or so. Both directions. Eighteen hours a day.
(later) (sigh!) Far too early, as usual. Whatever happened to that bit about “Get to the airport four hours before your flight”?
I had a nap after lunch, then set off at a slow pace by subway to Kipling. As we pulled into the station a new train pulled out. That's the first time I've seen one of the walk-through trains on the Bloor-Danforth line. I hop on the airport bus which mysteriously ploughs along Dundas to 427 and is then diverted up the East Mall to Bloor, describing two sides of a triangle instead of just taking the shortest route.
At the airport I ask where I should stand and a nice lady tells me “Here” which turns out to be the Lufthansa flight at six o'clock; I am the Air Canada/Lufthansa flight at 7:40, and when that is sorted out I go and use one of the new-fangled machines which will replace the tired clerks at the head of the six-plex line-ups.
I hate automated doo-dahs, but within three minutes I have managed to key in a code that looks like UWVXD73HB5HDC and have worked out which slit to slide my passport in. The machine display “Do you need more time?” so I mutter “Yes, but if you stopped prompting me to answer yes every few seconds I could work this out” and within three minutes I am in possession of a printed slip a.k.a. a boarding pass.
Is that all there is to it?
This removes those long-line-ups waiting for three tired check-in clerks. Now we have a long line-up for the two dozen tireless machines. This is progress
I now have three hours to kill. Whatever happened to that bit about “Get to the airport four hours before your flight”?
I wander the length of Departures in Terminal 1 and then wander the floor-with-no-name immediately below that, and then the next floor down which is Arrivals and decide to hop on the SkyTrain to kill some time.
The SkyTrain is fully automated – driver-less – and has been running here for about fifteen years. As far as I know, no fatalities, no crushed fingers. Smooth. Meanwhile back in Toronto the debate rages about driver-less subway trains ”It will never work. It is too risky, What if there is an emergency?” and so on.
I ride out to the Viscount Parking Lot and ride back again. On my return I check out the airport terminal of the UP Express. Just as at the other end in Toronto, it's a long, long walk to the UP Express. On the other hand, the TTC bus stops right outside each terminal and runs non-stop to the subway, and almost everybody has to hop on the subway once they arrive in downtown Toronto. Sigh!
I walk around a bit more and become convinced that all these snack bars, potato crisp dispensers, coffee shops and so on are mechanisms to relieve boredom. I walk past a pizza-slice bar and recall my experience in New Jersey. I quicken my pace.
So here I sit, at the wrong end of the departure lounge – aisle 13 instead of aisle 5, killing time by transcribing penciled notes to my net book.
My trusty netbook which still bears the sticky-tape cadged from the hotel Quatier Bercy two years ago, bravely holding the F1 and F2 keys in place, also the Ctrl/PgUp/PgDn set. BRAVE little netbook.
I find a seat at a bar-like table, plug in to the mains electricity and charge up my netbook and phone while I wait along with hundreds of others for the call. The earth rotates a little bit more and then we load by zones. I am in Zone 4, and take a seat out of, but conveniently close to the head of the lineup, so that when “Zone 4” is paged, by standing up I seem to join the family of the man in the bright red shirt.
We are shuffled aboard and I wonder once more why airlines don't load planes by column instead of by row. It seems to me that it might be faster to get all the window people settled, then all the middle people, and then the aisle people.
(Saturday, October 21, 2023 New United plan for economy class boarding: Window seats first, aisle seats last )
Not much more to say. We are twenty minutes late pushing out because some passenger failed to show, and their suitcase is in a forward container, so most of the containers have to be unloaded before the rogue suitcase can be identified. I am glad of the precaution but sit there wondering if they have got all the rogue suitcases.
More tomorrow.