Wednesday, September 19, 2001
This was originally posted on an old site about a year ago ...
For a few Euros more
19/09/2002
Or 21 Euros to go
We're living at the moment in an interesting no-man's land between the old, scarcely wired world and a future world of pervasive broadband. As we get closer to it, we become subtly more reliant on it, and the consequences of failure become creepingly more serious. Sooner or later we're going to have to start building communications networks and software the way they build systems that run airplanes. And the same goes for girlfriends.
These thoughts were provoked by a strange and terrible night I spent in Paris recently. I had gone to Paris only a couple of days previously to be with my girlfriend. Since Runtime supports teleworking, I was off to try it for a couple of months. I was well prepared - I'd just installed Linux on my ultra-cute Portege 2000 laptop, I'd got the inbuilt wireless network card working, as well as the Nokia GSM/GPRS PC-Card modem we bought a couple of years ago when that seemed like a good idea. I felt like the wiredest cutting-edge-est dude on the planet. The only downside was that my Portege came with a lousy internal software modem for which there was no Linux driver, so I'd have to buy a PC-Card modem.
I took the train from London to Paris, travelling at 300Km/hour through northern France all the while sending emails through my European Roaming Orange account via the Nokia (albeit at 19200 baud). It was a beautiful day, and all seemed set for a bright future of chic Parisian living. That afternooon I went out and bought myself a PC-Card modem, as well as to investigate ADSL solutions in Paris. Although I didn't know it, things were already beginning to unwind.
Firstly in my naivety I bought a Winmodem - little knowing that this was a minor irritating outpost of the evil M$ empire that would waste a good part of the next day. My Nokia card just worked when I plugged it in - but the Portege barfed when I tried to insert this spawn of Satan. So now I'm stuck in a studio in Paris with an expensive trickle of bandwidth and I'm not feeling quite so hip. No matter though i a bit of surfing and I find out about Linmodems; a bit more and I find that the chipset on my phone is compatible with the drivers that have been written; better still – a wonderful man named Marv Stodolsky has written packages for all the distributions and a script to tell me which version to use. I use the magic of apt-get to install the debian package I need. Truly the dark lord will never triumph while there are still such warriors as Marv and the debianauts to beat them back.
So - joy - I've doubled my bandwidth - as long as I'm on a phone line. ADSL seems pretty expensive in Paris - but there's a great little cable company called Noos that will do you always-on at 128K via a cable modem for 19 Euros a month. That's a fantastic deal. And for the first four months they're offering 512K for the same price! Go Noos! Roast those France Telecom sluggards! I'm poised to sign up with my Visa/Delta card when my hand is stayed. Girlfriend seems in a bit of a funny mood. Perhaps I've been spending too much time worrying about comms. Perhaps we should talk before I commit her flat to a year long contract and a visit from a cable installer.
If only I'd known. She comes back from work that evening, and she WANTS ME TO LEAVE!!!! I mean, what? I've moved heaven and earth to come and be with her AT HER REQUEST and she waits 'til I've been there all of 24 hours before it's all over. #”@@@@|}{|%%$#@ as they say in Asterix. That's all I'm going to say. If you want to hear more (of which there is plenty) you can join me in the pub.
So suddenly I am, quite literally, out on the street. It's been a very long time since this has happenned to me and all kinds of long-hidden feelings – horrors forgotten yet all too familiar - are awakening themselves in me as I walk dazed down the avenue. I'm thinking - this is all wrong, go back - no, that would be a mistake - whatever you do keep it together. I forgot to mention something. My mobile phone is Vodaphone and last Friday (last Friday! Things looked pretty different then) they phoned up to offer to change my tariff to something that would suit my European roaming road warrior ways better. Hollow laughter. Great I thought - good service. But they screwed it up. For 2 days my phone didn't work at all. I finally got through to them and after accusing me of all sorts of things (opportunity to practise steely firm polite resolved devastating telephone manner - key skill of modern life) they admitted they'd made the mistake and unbarred me. Earlier that day I'd had to phone them again from Paris as the European roaming wasn't working - same deal. I had to turn the phone off for an hour and then it would work. As if. So I'm out on my ear on the streets of Paris and my phone's not working and I don't know where to go or what to do.
I've got enough cash to make a phone call or buy a coffee - so I go for the coffee. I sit there with my laptop and the Nokia and start to look for flights out of this lousy town. German businessmen eye my tech with envy -if only they knew. Another thing I forgot to mention - I'm supposed to be going to Nice the next day to visit a client. Oh yes, she knew that. I'm going down there with the EasyJet - and I know that unlike most low-cost airlines they allow you to switch flights for a modest fee. I'll go to the airport. I'll either go to Nice tonight (easyjet.com tells me there's a flight at 10) or go back to London, depending on whether I think I can face the trip to Nice. Worst case, I'll stay the night at a hotel at the airport (one of the myriad identikit soul-free business hotels run by the French company Accor). So I take the RER through the Paris suburbs in the fading light towards the airport and allow myself to think of my situation as romantic and tragic which makes me feel a little better.
I arrive at the airport to find EasyJet is in the new terminal 9 - a pre-fab shed in one corner of the airport, but close to the RER station. My mobile's still not working, but I manage to find a phone that will take my Visa debit card (most French public phones only take smart cards) and make a couple of calls. These confirm what I already knew - I should go to Nice. The EasyJet desk is a cardboard cutout booth like the one Lucy used to sell lemonade from in Peanuts. The McJobber behind the desk is tired and crotchety but recognises a non-hostile fellow traveller. Yes, I can change my flight for the low low fee of 21 Euros. Great, I say, and hand over my card. I'm sorry he says, we don't take these cards. You don't take Visa? Not when it's a debit card. You're sure? Absolutely. It's the same card that I used to buy the ticket in the first place over the web, it's the one you've got in your database. I'm sorry, monsieur, this machine will not take it.
I don't have 21 Euros in cash. Co-incidentally this is the exact amount I spent earlier in the day on a present for my now ex-girlfriend. The woman in that shop wouldn't accept my card either. I go to the Travelex booth to see if I can draw cash on it. I did this at Nice airport a couple of weeks back. No, they've got the same machines.
At this point, I lost heart a little. I walked the half a kilometre of airport concrete to the Hotel Ibis ( foremost amongst Accor's crimes of production-line cheapness dressed in the flimsiest disguise of class). Could I have a room for the night? Desole, monsieur, on est complet. En plus, il n'y a aucune chambre a l'aeroport ni dans les hotels de Paris, tout est complet. This is French for, you're fucked mate. So I sit in the lobby, get online, and think again. Then it occurs to me that I've changed my ticket over the phone before using the card. I can just get the phone number in the UK and do it again. No sooner said than looked-up, but the phones in the hotel lobby are the kind that only take smart cards, so I have to take the trek back to the terminal. After the usual 2 or 3 minutes of advertising from EasyJet's so-called customer relationship management system (when will companies realise how damaging this is?) I get through to Lynn. But what's this? My flight has already been changed, and marked as a cash payment. I explain. Well, you'll have to go back and talk to the man at the desk. OK. I go back and talk to the man at the desk. I explain. He tries to take payment on the card. He was right - it doesn't work. We agree that he'll cancel the change, and I'll remake it on the phone. I phone up again (I've easily passed the 21 Euros in phone costs by now). Same adverts using the same tone of astonished delight at the bounty of EasyJet. Explain again, this time to Jane. Still, I'm down as booked on the 10 o'clock flight. 'I'll just go and talk to my supervisor'. 5 minutes and 10 Euros pass. It's ok, you can have the change for free, just go and check in.
But of course, by now, the gate had closed.
There really were no rooms in hotels in Paris. On the way back in on the RER, to sleep on the floor at EvilGirlfriend's, a woman got on with two of the heaviest, most unweildy bags I'd ever seen. She spoke French in a difficult accent, and was clutching a ticket from Air Cameroon. She was going to Luxembourg to start a four year degree course, she'd left everything behind, and arrived in this strange place. She had to get to the Gare de l'Est (a change away from the line we were on) in time to make her connection. There was no way she was going to make it on her own, so I went with her. On the way, while passing through a barrier, I put down my wallet and passport and left them there. Fifty yards further on three young Algerians caught up with me and gave them back.
I'm not normally a believer in fate but all this seemed to be pretty incontroversial evidence that girlfriend and I were destined to spend long and happy years together raising children. Who could deny the romance of such a story, especially one so well told?
You get one guess.
Coda: I'm writing this on the Eurostar on the way back. We arrived at Ashford and were turfed out of the train and put onto a 30 year old wooden slow commuter train. A different Eurostar, one going to Disneyland, had failed, and the company in its wisdom decided that giving them our train was the best solution. The low battery light on the laptop is flashing. I'm trying to connect to post this on Later and the syslog's telling me
FAILED: no connection
FAILED: no connection
For a few Euros more
19/09/2002
Or 21 Euros to go
We're living at the moment in an interesting no-man's land between the old, scarcely wired world and a future world of pervasive broadband. As we get closer to it, we become subtly more reliant on it, and the consequences of failure become creepingly more serious. Sooner or later we're going to have to start building communications networks and software the way they build systems that run airplanes. And the same goes for girlfriends.
These thoughts were provoked by a strange and terrible night I spent in Paris recently. I had gone to Paris only a couple of days previously to be with my girlfriend. Since Runtime supports teleworking, I was off to try it for a couple of months. I was well prepared - I'd just installed Linux on my ultra-cute Portege 2000 laptop, I'd got the inbuilt wireless network card working, as well as the Nokia GSM/GPRS PC-Card modem we bought a couple of years ago when that seemed like a good idea. I felt like the wiredest cutting-edge-est dude on the planet. The only downside was that my Portege came with a lousy internal software modem for which there was no Linux driver, so I'd have to buy a PC-Card modem.
I took the train from London to Paris, travelling at 300Km/hour through northern France all the while sending emails through my European Roaming Orange account via the Nokia (albeit at 19200 baud). It was a beautiful day, and all seemed set for a bright future of chic Parisian living. That afternooon I went out and bought myself a PC-Card modem, as well as to investigate ADSL solutions in Paris. Although I didn't know it, things were already beginning to unwind.
Firstly in my naivety I bought a Winmodem - little knowing that this was a minor irritating outpost of the evil M$ empire that would waste a good part of the next day. My Nokia card just worked when I plugged it in - but the Portege barfed when I tried to insert this spawn of Satan. So now I'm stuck in a studio in Paris with an expensive trickle of bandwidth and I'm not feeling quite so hip. No matter though i a bit of surfing and I find out about Linmodems; a bit more and I find that the chipset on my phone is compatible with the drivers that have been written; better still – a wonderful man named Marv Stodolsky has written packages for all the distributions and a script to tell me which version to use. I use the magic of apt-get to install the debian package I need. Truly the dark lord will never triumph while there are still such warriors as Marv and the debianauts to beat them back.
So - joy - I've doubled my bandwidth - as long as I'm on a phone line. ADSL seems pretty expensive in Paris - but there's a great little cable company called Noos that will do you always-on at 128K via a cable modem for 19 Euros a month. That's a fantastic deal. And for the first four months they're offering 512K for the same price! Go Noos! Roast those France Telecom sluggards! I'm poised to sign up with my Visa/Delta card when my hand is stayed. Girlfriend seems in a bit of a funny mood. Perhaps I've been spending too much time worrying about comms. Perhaps we should talk before I commit her flat to a year long contract and a visit from a cable installer.
If only I'd known. She comes back from work that evening, and she WANTS ME TO LEAVE!!!! I mean, what? I've moved heaven and earth to come and be with her AT HER REQUEST and she waits 'til I've been there all of 24 hours before it's all over. #”@@@@|}{|%%$#@ as they say in Asterix. That's all I'm going to say. If you want to hear more (of which there is plenty) you can join me in the pub.
So suddenly I am, quite literally, out on the street. It's been a very long time since this has happenned to me and all kinds of long-hidden feelings – horrors forgotten yet all too familiar - are awakening themselves in me as I walk dazed down the avenue. I'm thinking - this is all wrong, go back - no, that would be a mistake - whatever you do keep it together. I forgot to mention something. My mobile phone is Vodaphone and last Friday (last Friday! Things looked pretty different then) they phoned up to offer to change my tariff to something that would suit my European roaming road warrior ways better. Hollow laughter. Great I thought - good service. But they screwed it up. For 2 days my phone didn't work at all. I finally got through to them and after accusing me of all sorts of things (opportunity to practise steely firm polite resolved devastating telephone manner - key skill of modern life) they admitted they'd made the mistake and unbarred me. Earlier that day I'd had to phone them again from Paris as the European roaming wasn't working - same deal. I had to turn the phone off for an hour and then it would work. As if. So I'm out on my ear on the streets of Paris and my phone's not working and I don't know where to go or what to do.
I've got enough cash to make a phone call or buy a coffee - so I go for the coffee. I sit there with my laptop and the Nokia and start to look for flights out of this lousy town. German businessmen eye my tech with envy -if only they knew. Another thing I forgot to mention - I'm supposed to be going to Nice the next day to visit a client. Oh yes, she knew that. I'm going down there with the EasyJet - and I know that unlike most low-cost airlines they allow you to switch flights for a modest fee. I'll go to the airport. I'll either go to Nice tonight (easyjet.com tells me there's a flight at 10) or go back to London, depending on whether I think I can face the trip to Nice. Worst case, I'll stay the night at a hotel at the airport (one of the myriad identikit soul-free business hotels run by the French company Accor). So I take the RER through the Paris suburbs in the fading light towards the airport and allow myself to think of my situation as romantic and tragic which makes me feel a little better.
I arrive at the airport to find EasyJet is in the new terminal 9 - a pre-fab shed in one corner of the airport, but close to the RER station. My mobile's still not working, but I manage to find a phone that will take my Visa debit card (most French public phones only take smart cards) and make a couple of calls. These confirm what I already knew - I should go to Nice. The EasyJet desk is a cardboard cutout booth like the one Lucy used to sell lemonade from in Peanuts. The McJobber behind the desk is tired and crotchety but recognises a non-hostile fellow traveller. Yes, I can change my flight for the low low fee of 21 Euros. Great, I say, and hand over my card. I'm sorry he says, we don't take these cards. You don't take Visa? Not when it's a debit card. You're sure? Absolutely. It's the same card that I used to buy the ticket in the first place over the web, it's the one you've got in your database. I'm sorry, monsieur, this machine will not take it.
I don't have 21 Euros in cash. Co-incidentally this is the exact amount I spent earlier in the day on a present for my now ex-girlfriend. The woman in that shop wouldn't accept my card either. I go to the Travelex booth to see if I can draw cash on it. I did this at Nice airport a couple of weeks back. No, they've got the same machines.
At this point, I lost heart a little. I walked the half a kilometre of airport concrete to the Hotel Ibis ( foremost amongst Accor's crimes of production-line cheapness dressed in the flimsiest disguise of class). Could I have a room for the night? Desole, monsieur, on est complet. En plus, il n'y a aucune chambre a l'aeroport ni dans les hotels de Paris, tout est complet. This is French for, you're fucked mate. So I sit in the lobby, get online, and think again. Then it occurs to me that I've changed my ticket over the phone before using the card. I can just get the phone number in the UK and do it again. No sooner said than looked-up, but the phones in the hotel lobby are the kind that only take smart cards, so I have to take the trek back to the terminal. After the usual 2 or 3 minutes of advertising from EasyJet's so-called customer relationship management system (when will companies realise how damaging this is?) I get through to Lynn. But what's this? My flight has already been changed, and marked as a cash payment. I explain. Well, you'll have to go back and talk to the man at the desk. OK. I go back and talk to the man at the desk. I explain. He tries to take payment on the card. He was right - it doesn't work. We agree that he'll cancel the change, and I'll remake it on the phone. I phone up again (I've easily passed the 21 Euros in phone costs by now). Same adverts using the same tone of astonished delight at the bounty of EasyJet. Explain again, this time to Jane. Still, I'm down as booked on the 10 o'clock flight. 'I'll just go and talk to my supervisor'. 5 minutes and 10 Euros pass. It's ok, you can have the change for free, just go and check in.
But of course, by now, the gate had closed.
There really were no rooms in hotels in Paris. On the way back in on the RER, to sleep on the floor at EvilGirlfriend's, a woman got on with two of the heaviest, most unweildy bags I'd ever seen. She spoke French in a difficult accent, and was clutching a ticket from Air Cameroon. She was going to Luxembourg to start a four year degree course, she'd left everything behind, and arrived in this strange place. She had to get to the Gare de l'Est (a change away from the line we were on) in time to make her connection. There was no way she was going to make it on her own, so I went with her. On the way, while passing through a barrier, I put down my wallet and passport and left them there. Fifty yards further on three young Algerians caught up with me and gave them back.
I'm not normally a believer in fate but all this seemed to be pretty incontroversial evidence that girlfriend and I were destined to spend long and happy years together raising children. Who could deny the romance of such a story, especially one so well told?
You get one guess.
Coda: I'm writing this on the Eurostar on the way back. We arrived at Ashford and were turfed out of the train and put onto a 30 year old wooden slow commuter train. A different Eurostar, one going to Disneyland, had failed, and the company in its wisdom decided that giving them our train was the best solution. The low battery light on the laptop is flashing. I'm trying to connect to post this on Later and the syslog's telling me
FAILED: no connection
FAILED: no connection
