![[qantas]](http://www.thoriverson.com/photos/2005/nz05_qantas_red_plane.jpg)
It has actually come to this? So many great experiences, so many wonderful people (except for that one), so many unforgettable memories. And yet, New Zealand’s final farewell for us is this: for the second time in three opportunities, Air New Zealand has failed to put our bags on the same plane as us. Even with a three-hour layover in Auckland. How does that happen? Have they employed tuatara to handle luggage and cargo? Three hours is usually enough even for Heathrow, for heaven’s sake, and Auckland’s not exactly the world’s biggest airport.
“They’ll be on the next flight,” assures the man clicking away at a computer with the sleek lines and processing power of the eighties. The early eighties. It’s got a green screen, it’s slower than Air NZ baggage handling, and the printer issuing my lost luggage report is a noisy old dot matrix model. Dot matrix. And yes, the paper is the appropriate relic, which I wasn’t even aware was still produced: alternating green and white stripes with perforated holes down the sides. What sort of bizarre time warp have we entered? Have all the country’s IT consultants gone walkabout?
…continued here.
4 comments:
Dear Thor:
Green bar paper! I suppose it could have been a daisy wheel printer...
Think you meant: http://www.thoriverson.com/articles_web/2005/NZ_55.html
Remind me to take some new screwcap pictures, wouldn't want the Creative Commons for synthetic closures to get stale.
Walt
Oops, thanks for the correction. Not sure how that slipped by me.
As for the printer, it probably would have been faster for him to write the report out longhand.
And thanks for the photo.
Surprisingly, until a few years ago, kangaroo was very exotic indeed (depending on your definition) for local consumers. Nowadays, you can buy loin fillets in the supermarket, but that's only come about in the last five years. Before that it was very much a 'gourmet' food - if you were an adventurous foodie, and didn't listen to people like my mother who would say, disapprovingly "Oh darling, we used to give kangaroo to the dogs..."
Finally, eventually, there's acknowledgement that kangaroos do far less damage to this country than beef cattle, and maybe we should eat more of it. It sure helps that it's a third the price of scotch fillet...
cheers,
Graeme
Interesting. It was easily (for certain values of "easily") available here long before that.
Why do you put Scotch on your beef? ;-)
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