About five or so days before our outbound journey from Dublin to New York, I logged onto the Delta website to make sure everything was in order. Little did I know the fun was about to start from right here. Everything was great outbound, but our seats had changed for the return journey. Not something so simple as sitting in a different pair of seats than the one’s we’d selected during booking, our new seats were now not even on the same row. A bit strange I thought, seeing as our seats were both on the same booking. Maybe they were accounting for those couples that go to New York, have a massive argument before returning and then want to sit as far away from each other as possible. Yes, that had to be it. A quick Google showed that this is apparently a fairly common occurrence and also that a quick word with someone in the Delta call center could sort it out straight away.

The next morning (about two days before departure), I phoned the Irish number for the Delta call center. After a few minutes on hold I was put through to a friendly representative who was of absolutely no use whatsoever. “The flight has been re-scheduled, I can’t change anything from here” was the response I got. “Speak to the check-in staff on your arrival at the airport, they’ll be able to fix it.” I thought nothing more of it as in the past, it’s been a simple ‘here’s what happened, can you fix it?’ conversation at check-in and seats get changed. No big deal.

So the big day came and we were off to Dublin airport at an hour of the morning that Julie rarely sees. I rarely see it either for that matter, only when I’m flying out to work in some far flung corner of wherever. Got to the airport, joined the check-in queue and filled out those wonderfully repetitive US immigration visa waiver forms. While our boarding passes and baggage tags were printing, I mentioned to the check-in woman about the mix up with the seats. “Oh” she started. “Oh that sometimes happens, but as the flight has been rescheduled, I can’t change anything from here. You’ll need to talk to a member of Delta staff when you land in JFK”. Right, this is all going around the houses a bit but for now I’m willing to play along. Queue lots of waiting around, filling in more forms, being looked up and down by customs and immigration people and finally more waiting around until we boarded the flight.

Having been informed about the marvelous seat back screens and entertainment systems before booking with Delta, I was interested to see what exactly all the fuss was about. Two Delta flights later and I’m still interested to see. Nothing says trans-Atlantic flying comfort like staring at the back of a fellow passengers bald spot for six hours. The only thing in the seat back in front of me was foam and even that was coming out at the raggedy edges. So instead of being able to choose my own TV, movies and whatever else is presumably on show somewhere in airline Nirvana, I got the usual ‘squint at a twelve inch screen fifteen feet away from me’. Niceties, bells and whistles aside, the plane did eventually touch down in New York’s JFK.

On stepping out of the plane into the terminal building the gravity of the situation that we found ourselves in became shockingly apparent. Not only had we flown back in time by five hours, we’d also gone back thirty five years! Dear God, a time-plane-thingy! Delta’s presence at JFK airport is, in a word, dated. I had to check the date on a newspaper to make sure we weren’t actually in the 1970′s and that my uber stylish t-shirt and boot-cut jeans combo wouldn’t be ridiculed by the flowery shirt and flare wearing population of New York City. No, it was still 2009. At least it was 2009 everywhere except Delta arrivals.

We were met by the driver of our overpriced car service at the arrivals hall and before leaving, I informed him that we needed to speak to a member of Delta staff to sort out our tickets for the way back in a weeks time. A hike from the arrivals to some kind of mini departures hall ensued and when we arrived there after getting lost twice in the maze of gray concrete and garish blue and red logos, we once again joined a queue. After the Delta staff member had finished filing her nails and talking on the phone, we were called forward. A puzzled look crossed her face and for a fleeting moment, I thought she was going to respond “Delta? Who are Delta?”. Instead, she said “Oh I can’t do anything now as the flight has been rescheduled, you’ll need to talk to the staff when you’re checking in next week”. I’d almost have preferred if she had reached over and slapped me across the face.

Out into the wilds of New York and the week long holiday began in earnest. Forgotten was the queuing, the blank-faced check-in women, the seat numbers and the depressing as a month long funeral airport terminal.

Alas, as it often does when you’re on holidays, a week passed all too quickly…

Back to the Delta departures hall in JFK. Several deep breaths walking from the taxi to the front door and we were ready to face whatever could be thrown at us. Hang on, there aren’t any check-in desks. There aren’t any check-in staff. There isn’t anyone to change our seat numbers. There were however two overworked looking people floating around the maze of automated check-in kiosks helping bewildered technophobe would-be passengers. Catching the attention of one of them, I inquired about the seat change. “Oh, you can change your seat when you check in using the kiosk”. I can? Wait… I can? Could this be true? There’s a light at the end of the tunnel? I turned and ran back to where Julie was standing with the cases, maintaining the aura of impeccable patience that surrounds her whenever we’ve spent ‘that much’ time together. Tap, tap, tap tap tap. Scan passport. Tap. Scan other passport. Then, in the corner of the screen a button appeared. “Change Seats”. We both almost couldn’t believe it. Pressed the button and a message popped up; “I’m sorry, you cannot change your seats because the flight has been re-scheduled.”

No, I jest. Had that popped up I surely would have eaten my passport to contain the venomous bile. Instead, the helpful screen showed that no seats were available. Nothing whatsoever. Not a sausage. Instead, seats were being assigned at the gate. So, we printed the boarding cards and went to drop our bags in. My bag, admittedly stuffed to the gills with all the t-shirts, jeans and other stuff I’d bought was a bit overweight. I didn’t check what the excess baggage rates were (first time in my long history of flying that I’ve ever gone over the limit) so I wasn’t sure what to expect. $20? $50? Surely something like that. The extra seven pounds of tourist trinkets, I [heart] NY mugs, clothes and whatever else I bought cost me an extra $150 at the gate. I can only assume my jaw hit the floor as I got an unpleasant taste of my own feet on my bottom lip. Instead of going to the hassle of re-distributing weight to Julie’s bag (which was just within the weight) and run the risk of undoing the delicate act of stuffing the bag I’d performed earlier on, I bit the bullet and coughed up the credit card. I will most definitely be comparing other airlines excess rates when I get home. Still possibly a good deal for the amount of stuff I bought though. Incidentally, I have found since writing this that the Aer Lingus excess baggage fee is €40 or $50. Aer Lingus apply the same weight limits as Delta.

Arrived at the gate, which was as fun and feature packed as the arrivals hall. Seriously Delta, invest some money in re-decorating the place. We were both first time visitors to the terminal at JFK airport and were completely in awe of what a poor welcome it is to one of the most amazing cities in the world. Maybe JFK is a pretty old airport and all, but that’s no excuse for how the place looks. If the Delta terminal was a cardboard box, I wouldn’t use it to bury a dead, rabid dog. If only out of the fear the ghost of the dog would come back and haunt me.

Nobody at the gate to even ask about the seats so instead, we went for a wander to the shop. A while later on returning to the gate, there was a member of Delta staff sitting at a small desk in front of the gate. I politely asked her about the seat mix up and she barked back “wait until your name is called, then come get your ticket”. I don’t think I even got the full sentence out. Ah air travel, the delight of the masses. Sat down for a while and only by chance Julie spotted the screen directly above our heads showing seats available and assigned. As soon as our names appeared on the screen I sprinted back to the desk where I was handed two boarding passes from a pre-printed stack. A pre-printed stack that had been sitting there when I first inquired about the seat change. Not to worry, I had boarding passes in hand that put us sitting next to each other for the almost six hour flight. At this stage I wasn’t even bothered that they’d stuck us right at the back of the plane, I just didn’t want either of us to have to spent the entirety of the flight gazing at some octogenarians family photos while being talked to death or being granted half a seat while the morbidly obese traveler next to us takes up a seat and a half. Both are woeful cliches but both happen with amazing frequency. Thankfully I’m normally only on 45 minute flights when either happen. This is why I always, without fail, bring headphones onto a flight. Even if I got nothing to plug them into. Simply tuck the end of the plug into your trouser pocket, take on a look that you’re listening to music or an audio book and repeat for however long the flight takes.

Right, in seat, strapped in and shoes off. Looking forward to some food, a bit of relaxation and being in a familiar bed in seven or eight hours time. Food service started. It slowed. Slowed again. By the time it got to row forty, it had almost slowed to a crawl. Chicken. I unclipped my tray and it landed in my lap. Literally. It didn’t bounce and stop an inch or two above my legs, the plastic tray met me in an uncomfortable manner. Obviously broken, I pointed it out to the flight attendant. “I can’t do anything about that right now” was the gruff and to the point response. Translation – I have no intention whatsoever of doing anything at all to remedy the problem. Here’s your God awful chicken, eat it on a slope and like it. In reality, I was just looking for an upgrade to business class. If I thought breaking a tray would get me that, I’d have ripped it from it’s hinges and flung it out into the aisle. Sadly, someone got there before me and this one was pre-broken. I ate my questionable chicken while balancing the tray with my knees. In fact, I ate and drank everything they handed out while balancing the broken tray with my knees. I’m now the world champion in broken airline tray balancing as confirmed by the association of broken airline tray balancers. I managed to steady the tray sufficiently to compose this rant of epic proportions anyway.

Toward the end of the flight (well, I say end but there was still at least 90 minutes to go until we landed) Julie went in search of the facilities. As anyone who has traveled in a plane knows, you get probably four toilets for however many hundred people are on board. Over the space of six hours, those four toilets see quite a bit of use. However, I have on several occasions seen staff checking on the whole cleanliness situation mid way through the flight and taking the necessary steps to rectify any problems. On finding a free toilet, Julie was advised to go back and put her shoes on as ‘guys have been using the toilet and it’s quite messy in there’. Right, so clean it then. I’m hardly suggesting that the staff are in any way responsible for how people use the toilet, but surely they should be on hand to ensure that the toilets remain clean and somewhat acceptable to use? During the flight, a child was quite ill in one of the toilets and the only evidence of Delta interaction with the scene was one of the male flight attendants looking on with a rather disgusted face while ushering the child’s father to one side so he could pass him in the aisle.

Great holiday, adequate flight, woefully bad service and ridiculously overpriced excess baggage charges. If flying with Delta has taught me one thing, it’s don’t fly with Delta. I hope when I write to them to point all this out that they don’t offer me a voucher off my next flight. Unless of course that voucher also works with Aer Lingus, KLM, Virgin or any one of the host of other airlines I’d rather give more money to for the same flight. The only good reason I can think of flying Delta is if you’re traveling for business and you want to arrive at your destination completely pissed off and ready to kick some ass in whatever business meeting you’re heading into.

Boss and Programmer are no more than 20 feet apart, separated only by a partition wall. Where’d I put that CV?

God help me…

It all started some years ago when I converted a Drag Star into cash, then after a long drive to Templemore and a short conversation with the unreasonably grumpy owner, I turned cash back into bike. It was the bike I’d been after for some time as what I wanted to do more than anything was load it up and head to warmer climes.

After what seemed like an eternity, that eventually came around when myself and herself hopped on the bike and took it to warmest of warm France via drizzly England. 2500 or so miles later and we were back where we started; Rosslare. So after that, it sat covered in the garage waiting for it’s next excursion. At that stage I’d found a job that offered a company vehicle. Bad news for the bike really. I didn’t fully realise it back then but it wasn’t long before the tax expired, the insurance expired and getting it back on the road seemed less and less likely.

So it sat in the garage under a canvas cover. I still had notions of getting back out on it for the summer but that dream went flat at the same time as the bikes battery. Wheeled out every so often for a wash and polish and once or twice when someone came to look at it. I mistakenly thought it’d be an easy bike to sell because it was rare. In fact, it’s probably the only one in Ireland. (That is, the only limited edition model). In reality though, all this made it harder to sell. I went through some unpleasant telephone conversations with dealers. Self styled motorbike guru’s who each assured me they knew the market backwards. Some offered to ‘do me a favour’ by taking the bike off my hands for significantly less than I asked for. No thanks.

It was listed on various advertising websites for ages and I’d get the odd phone call or email regarding it. Then, a very decisive bike owner from Wexford visited me yesterday and converted bike back into cash. I’ll miss it and I very much doubt I’ll be bikeless for very long but for now at least, it’s as if I’m missing part of the family. The only consolation is that with the cash raised from it’s sale, I can now be debt free for the first time in about 7 years. Well, apart from the mortgage… that doesn’t really count though as we’ll be paying that off for the next thirty years!

Then, on Thursday morning, Eoin decided it’d be great if I made a speech. Hmm, not too sure about that one. I was all set to tell him it was a bad idea when we met in the pub on Thursday night, but as these things often go, after a few pints of the devilish black stuff (Murphy’s of course) were consumed, I decided that not only was it a good idea to make a speech, it was the best idea. Right up there with hotpants and sliced bread. It seems I was railroaded into it by myself. Dang.

The following morning, wondering what I’d say and how I’d say it gave way to wondering how much I could say before getting asked to sit down. I was up on 2 A4 pages before I even realised I started. To put it as I can only understand it, I blogged with pen & paper. Having never written or delivered a speech in my entire life, I can only hope it comes off as well in delivery tomorrow evening as it sounds in my head. Then again, I think everything is a bit rose tinted in there lately.

So once this weekend is over, I can possibly get back to processing. Hooray. The only thing that I’m left to worry about after this is that once the first of my school friends is married, where does it all end?

A rant, more or less summed up by the above slightly doctored photograph. The first in a series of long overdue rants, each spiraling off on it’s own wonderful tangent, designed to clear the mental air so I can get back to posting photos and waffling on about them endlessly. More or less…

So anyway there we were, driving down from Sligo on a truly pissy Sunday evening. It rained, then the rain turned to sleet and finally snow. The snow froze and turned to sleet, I was mistaking them for top flite at one stage. At any moment, I imagined Tiger Woods and Padraig Harrington might come raining down on my windscreen. The drive from Sligo is, in places, unnervingly hairy. Especially from Sligo to Galway. Then you hit the traffic in Limerick and sit around twiddling your thumbs/tickling your balls/finding as yet new and unexplored crevasses in which to mine for fluff. That kind of thing. You get through Charleville and it’s the home straight. You’ll be home in 40 minutess, maybe a little less if you don’t get stuck behind some bloody rental car or fucking idiot with a 2 meter eyesight range.

Then, a wonderful sound. That unmistakable sound of a wheel rim ploughing a trough into the tarmac. You pull over and yes indeed, some little bastard of a screw has been lying in wait for your lovely rubbery tire. The little prick; Quite literally. What makes it even worse than that? Why you’re driving a French car with a poxy, useful as a cotton condom French toolkit. As a people, the French must not break down that much. I’m sure if they had any experience with their toolkits (i.e. by getting stuck at the side of the road for an hour and a half pissing around) they might re-evaluate their whole emergency provisions. But no.

Having never actually seen the spare wheel or indeed the toolkit of my car before Sunday (I’ve only had it since April 2006), I was hugely, nay overwhelmingly moved to see Citroen’s idea of a set of tools with which one repairs one’s motor vehicle. Moved first to frustration, then to anger, then very close to dementia. In the space of how ever bloody long I was standing by the side of the road wrestling with a tire iron the length of a less than generous toothpick (and coincidentally made out of weaker material than one), no fewer than 100 cars passed me in a variety of weather conditions. Having changed numerous flat tires before, I imagined I’d have it done in fifteen minutes. Eh no. I lost count of the amount of well equipped 4×4′s with their well equipped toolkits that passed me by within the first 10 minutes. At one stage, a troop of 3 seemingly ‘professional off-roaders’ passed me with the entire kitchen sink strapped to their bonnets. Livid. I swore ten years worth of my filth quota out within the first 20 minutes. Twenty Major would have blushed.

As the hailstones pelted down I tried in vain to shelter myself while still wrestling with the wheel that would just not come off. I kicked it, pushed it, tried to lever it off with my ultra-shitty toolkit and even resorted to a few Jackie Chan style flying kicks in it’s general direction. Fucking wheel! I didn’t fully lose hope until It came to pass that the tool I was using in a vain attempt to remove the stuck wheel was in fact made out of softer metal than the wheel itself. Bra-fucking-vo Citroen. I’d have killed for some leverage. If I had had a paper clip, a small amount of gaffer tape and some nearby branches I could have MacGyver’d a better set of bloody tools.

At one stage near the bitter end, I stood up and soaked from head to toe with the titleist bouncing off my eyeballs, a little piece of shit Honda Civic (oh I’ve got your license plate number by the way) flew past, horn blaring and a bunch of baseball bat perching mother fuckers inside laughing their tiny minds out. Lucky for them I still had a modicum of self control and I resisted the urge to throw the solid steel tow-hook I was carrying through their back window as the car slowed for the prolonged enjoyment of the genetic mistakes inside. You haven’t heard the last of that one, you Carlow fuckers.

Oh but that’s not all, several minutes before that a Gardaí squad car, full to the brim with ‘helpful civil servants’ slithered past at a pace so pedestrian it seemed to scream out “we could help you, but I really don’t want to bother”. One thing’s for damn certain, the Irish police force (or at least the wankers that passed me) will never be able to use the ol “To protect and to serve” tagline. Useless shower of bastards.

All this time I’d been praying for the tiniest drop of WD40 so it was like all my birthdays and Christmases come at once when a helpful local rounded up from a nearby house handed me a huge can of it. Five seconds later the wheel was off. 2 minutes after that, I was tightening the wheel nuts with the spare on and was on the way. Certainly made me feel like my last hour and a bit was well spent. At least I went someway toward destroying the shittiest car toolkit in the history of automation.

So to everyone that passed a white Citroen C4 on the Cork road just outside Newtwopothouse (yes that is actually a place name) on Sunday the 18th March, may you all die screaming in pain. To the Gardaí, may your overtime be slashed repeatedly and may you eventually be replaced by a far lower cost group of reserves. To the 4×4 drivers, It would have taken 5 fucking minutes out of your hugely hectic social schedule to stop and help me. To the Carlow branch of Burberry Ireland, I hope your kids turn out to be as pig ignorant, woefully stupid and generally as belligerent as you no doubt were to your parents. I hope they never move out of the tenement you save all your lives to buy and most of all, I hope when you get put in a retirement home it ends up appearing on primetime. And not for any good reasons either. Finally, to the service monkeys that removed my ‘free 24 hour Citroen roadside assistance’ sticker from inside my windscreen to replace it with a ‘your next service is due on…’ sticker, I’ll see you on April 2nd and I’ll be bringing the lube made from chili peppers..

It’s not all negative though. It will make me do a number of things. 1, go to a hardware shop and buy a good tire iron. 2, get a can of WD40 which stays in the car permanently. 3, give aid to any motorists I see by the side of the road that look like they’re in need of it. That’s it. I’m finished. Where’s the whiskey?

Ray was preceded by a performance by Leona Naess who was just the ticket and complimented nicely the performance to come. I and I’m sure many people in the audience were surprised how soft spoken Ray actually is, given the unbelievable sound he’s capable of making. After the first couple of songs, I started to wonder if he’d interact with the audience at all, or so a recent article on him would have had me believe. He thanked the gathered masses profusely for generous applause, made some jokes and overall remained hugely polite. All that despite a few people in the audience that I think would have liked to reorganise his chosen play list.

All to be expected with a boisterous Corkonian crowd however and that of course is half the charm of going to a gig in Cork. It was an amazing gig with amazing talent from both the main man himself and his band. I can only imagine he went onto Limerick the following evening and played to yet another capacity crowd. Before anyone asks, yes; I’ve been kicking myself quite hard since the gig last Thursday that I didn’t bring my camera. Front row and all. Could have gotten some amazing shots (maybe) but I decided not to chance it as I didn’t really feel like getting booted out of the Opera House. That didn’t seem to bother the rest of the crowd, who’s flashes lit up the room throughout the whole gig. Ahh, it’ll do me no harm to have one night without the ol’ camera!