My letter.  Not as good as the Virgin passenger one (see previous post), hence the absence of a million-dollar-offer of compensation, but nonetheless good enough for a friend to "compliment" that "I wanted to burst out laughing many times as i read your complaint.  I couldn’t have written it any better".

My better half, on the other hand, was unconvinced ("wah lau, is it as chiak lat as you make it sound ?").  She obviously does not have what it takes to be an air stewardess, which is why she isn’t one.

I am tremendously disappointed by my recent experience with XX.  On my 18 March flight from Kuala Lumpur to Manila via Singapore (XXXXX and XXXXX), my luggage was misplaced because of a "technical failure". It ended up back in Kuala Lumpur, and I was told that I could only get it back at 2 pm on 19 March, when the earliest flight from Kuala Lumpur landed in Manila. 

That luggage contained many items which were important for my business trip to Manila, including my business suit and work documents which I needed for a meeting early the next morning. It also contained clean undergarments and medication (which, thankfully, I did not require to treat any potentially life-threatening medical condition). 

I informed your staff of all this. Instead of offering a solution, your staff only gave me an amenities kit and 3,300 pesos as interim compensation (which was practically useless given that it was already 9.30 pm, and I would have no time to shop for a new set of clothes before my meeting).

When I refused delivery of the luggage to my hotel as I would probably not be at the hotel to receive the luggage the next day, I was told to pick up the luggage from the misplaced luggage section of the airport on my own before departing for Singapore. (I was also scheduled to leave Manila for Singapore at 6 pm on 19 March.) 

As it was very late, I had no choice but to take what I was given and make my way to the hotel.

In the circumstances, I attended the business meeting on 19 March in my stale t-shirt and slacks, without my working documents, and had to leave early to ensure that I could retrieve my luggage before departure. Needless to say, I looked like a total idiot, and my business counterparts and supervisors were totally unimpressed. I also had to bear with the discomfort of using stale clothes and undergarments all this while, and until I returned to Singapore. 

At Manila airport, I had great difficulty retrieving the misplaced luggage. This included having to climb up and down several flights of stairs with the heavy luggage in order to make my way to the different sections of the airport (ie. arrival, departure and the security pass office), and some anxiety as your staff initially could not locate the luggage in the misplaced luggage room.

It was only around 4.30 pm or less than an hour before boarding time, that someone suggested that my luggage might still be in the belt which, as it turned out, was the case. You can imagine the consequences if I did not have the foresight to refuse delivery of the luggage to the hotel, or to arrive early at the airport to so that I would have some time to retrieve the luggage.

I am deeply disappointed with how XX (mis)handled this matter. It had completely under-estimated the inconvenience that the misplaced luggage would cause, and took steps which were far from adequate to address the situation. 

To add insult to injury, when I approached your check-in counter supervisor at Manila with my complaint, she was hardly apologetic and instead said that as a business class passenger I had already received 1,000 pesos more compensation compared to economy class passengers. 

Your customer service officer, as did all your other staff, completely missed the point. Monetary compensation is not the issue here (and even then, 3,300 pesos or approximately SGD100 for misplaced luggage is significantly smaller than SGD400 - 600 which travel insurance would usually pay for such a lengthy delay). The issue is the potential loss of business opportunities, as well as embarrassment and loss of personal standing, and significant discomfort and inconvenience, as a result of your negligence and inadequate management of the consequences of that negligence.

Might I also add that your amenities kit lacks a shaving razor ?  (Thankfully my hotel had one).

I wrote a complaint letter to the airline which one of my colleagues flatteringly commented as well-written.  Well, I tried hard, but my letter didn’t quite achieve the humour or standard of this one by a disgrutled Virgin passenger :

Dear Mr Branson,

REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008

I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.

Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at thehands of your corporation.

Look at this Richard. Just look at it: [see image 1, above].

I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?

You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they. Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in: [see image 2, above].

I know it looks like a baaji but it’s in custard Richard, custard. It must be the pudding. Well you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn’t custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. It’s only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the meal on the left might be the desert after all.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment. I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents and if they knew I had started desert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries. So lets peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer.

I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.

Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this: [see image 3, above].

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Baaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any man could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird.

Once it was regurgitated it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard Richard.

By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit. Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier due to it’s baffling presentation: [see image 4, above].

It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.

I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax but obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour. I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.

Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard entertainment. I switched it on: [see image 5, above].

I apologise for the quality of the photo, it’s just it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen. Perhaps it would be better on another channel: [see image 6, above].

Is that Ray Liotta? A question I found myself asking over and over again throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this. After that I switched off. I’d had enough. I was the hungriest I’d been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.

My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food, or sleep. Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it surpassed my wildest expectations: [see image 7, above].

Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie. Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.

Richard…. What is that white stuff? It looked like it was going to be yoghurt. It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture between the Baaji custard and the Mustard sauce. It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and refreshers. I lied to my new friends and told them I’d done it loads of times. When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese Richard, a cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your baaji-mustard.

So that was that Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing. My only question is: How can you live like this? I can’t imagine what dinner round your house is like, it must be like something out of a nature documentary.

As I said at the start I love your brand, I really do. It’s just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to it’s knees and begging for sustenance.

Yours Sincererly

XXXX

Source : The Telegraph

I’m glad that I don’t have to fly from Heathrow to Mumbai (or the reverse) in the course of my work.

I’ve been busy with business travel the past week, spending more time in taxis, airports and in the air than in the office or at home. 

The waiting absolutely bores me.  Even if the shopping were to be extensive as that at Changi Airport (which it wasn’t — there were airports where I would be happy to have working airconditioning), I’m really not the Gucci and Prada type so those high end shops really don’t excite me.

So I am grateful that Blackberry Instant Messaging is about the only fun stuff on my Blackberry which the company hasn’t disabled.  In times of absolute boredom I turn to my Blackberry to update my colleagues on how inane my day went.  Some are quite funny — I think — so I’ve decided to record them here for posterity.

Take for example this strange encounter with a lawyer from la-la land -

Me : "The [ other ] counsel today was full of emotional nonsense (she was female, of course). Alluded to me being unethical.  She asked "can you tell me how [the draft agreement] is reasonable, moral or ethical" ?  Hullo this is not her first time negotiating agreements right? And its not as if her company is unrepresented. Its my duty to put my best foot forward for my client, and the same applies to her.  I tried to assuage her by saying that these (onerous) provisions are not new and pre-existed this draft, and obviously someone in the past must have found them reasonable enough to agree to. On hindsight that didn’t come out right (I was trying hard not to be sarcarstic), because the project manager stepped in to say that the provisions could be negotiated and she should just put in her suggested changes."

Colleague : "she prob has PMS; ignore her."

And then my baggage got misdirected while on transit to another city via Singapore.  The misdirected bag had my business suit and documents, as well as fresh underwear.

Me at 7.30 am : "XX misdirected my luggage and it will arrive in Manila only 2 pm today which is too late bcos my mtg starts at 8 today. Now I have to attend the mtg naked and without my working docs. What claim shld I pursue against XX? Money cannot compensate for me looking like an idiot in front of clients today. Well money can but they won’t give me 1 mil."

Me at 5.10 pm : (My colleague had IM-ed to relate how, at a seminar, she had to hide her black bottega lookalike bag from someone carrying the real thing).  "You can’t look worse than me, dressed in a pink shirt and slacks at a meeting with every other person in a suit.  Stupid XX didn’t even have the decency to offer me an upgrade. I am so going to send them a stinker when I get home.  Maybe I should send them my underwear. I’ve had it on for about 36 hrs already. Yup, that’s a real stinker."

It was my father’s second death anniversary yesterday.  I tried to get the family together for lunch or dinner on Sunday to commemorate the occasion, without success. 

I wonder if anyone in the family other than my mother, Joyce and me remembered the occasion.  One of my sisters asked "why are we having dinner on Sunday" — this was before we cancelled dinner — and I could not resist responding with an enigmatic "what do you think ?" hoping to hear that she remembered.  No luck there.

As a Christian I believe that life does not end with death, and that fellow believers have an "afterlife" with God after our physical death on earth.  Therefore, remembering the dead has nothing to do with obsessing over feelings of loss, or a morbid belief that the dead need to be worshipped or placated or provided for in their afterlife.

So why do Christians remember the dead ?  Should we care at all ?  I think we should.

1.  We remember the dead to come to terms with our emotions.

I think that fundamentally, we need to remember to dead in order to come to terms with our immediate sense of loss.  All the crying at funerals and death anniversaries makes little sense when we consider that the dead have entered into a new and better afterlife, but such times are needed for many to come to terms with their emotions.  One of the most insensitive incidents I had encountered in hospital recently, were doctors who repeatedly told a family to "pull the plug" on a loved one who was terminally ill and medically beyond hope of recovery, without giving the family time to come to terms with their loss.

Well before the New Testament was written, Jesus, Son of God, knew that there was a new and better life with God after physical death.  Yet in John 11:35 it is recorded that He wept at the death / funeral of Lazarus.  In other words, Jesus felt the emotional loss.  This tells me that in any death, apart from a clinical understanding of life after death, are complex emotions that we have to grapple with.  Setting aside a time and place to remember the dead, helps us to come to terms with these emotions.

2.  We remember the dead to give thanks to God for our shared past.

We remember the dead because we are grateful to God for giving us a wonderful past with the deceased.  Not all our memories of a deceased person will be positive.  However, remembering the deceased helps us to reflect on the good memories that we want to give thanks to God for. 

One of the important aspects of worship of God in the Old Testament, were religious festivals which would encourage the Israelites to reflect on their past, which would in turn cause them to remember how God had blessed them in the past, and give thanks.  When we remember the dead, we do so partly in order to reflect on how God has blessed us, through them, and give thanks to God.

On the other hand, to simply forget the deceased is ungratefulness for the good that God has given to us through them.

3.  We remember the dead to learn from their past.

Remembering the dead also helps us reflect on what was positve or negative about the deceased, and to learn from their good and how not to be like them in how they have not been good.

Romans 15:4 tells us that the past as recorded in the Scriptures is intended to teach us, "so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope". 

1  Corinthians 10:11 tells us that the past as recorded in the Scriptures is intended to warn us against making similar mistakes.

I believe the same principles apply when we remember the dead.  We learn from their past to emulate what is positive, and to avoid the mistakes that they might have made.

4.  We remember the dead to look forward with hope to the future.

Remembering the dead gives us something to hope for, in the future.  It reminds us that our life on this earth is impermanent, and encourages us to look forward to, and work towards a, future life with those whom we love and who have pre-deceased us.

What does the world look like to a three year old kid ?  At my mother-in-law’s wake Jed had a chance to fiddle with the camera and here are some of the shots he took.