Work rant.

Normally I don't tell much about my work. Today I will tell a little bit of what happened this week, things that stood out from the 'usual' and normally boring stuff. 

On Wednesday, I worked with my colleague Iris again. I had looked forward to it because she had been on vacation and was away for almost four weeks so there was quite some chatting to be done to catch up with each others. When I went to the airport together with Jelle (we started the same time that day) I remember saying to him I hoped for a 'normal' day because usually when I work with Iris there is 'shit' happening during our shift... And as if I knew it indeed it was to be a terrible day...

It all started with a flight to Vienna. The originally planned aircraft (an Airbus 319) had a technical defect and they did not have an equivalent plane to replace it but only a much smaller one, resulting in an extreme overbooking of the flight. My colleagues from the day shift already prepared everything and most people only flying to Vienna were rebooked to a later flight that evening, about three hours later. As per the new EU passenger rights this is considered force majeur and passengers are not entitled to financial compensations. Quite a few passengers were not very happy being 'bumped' from their original flight to the later one, understandably. Today I even heard from Jelle that due to bad weather in Vienna the later flight even had to devert to Bratislava and the aircraft finally arrived in Vienna at 01.30 at night! Terrible, isn't it? But that wasn't the worst part for us, Iris and me: they cancelled our own last flight to Frankfurt due to bad weather in Germany. Quickly, the lines in front of our counter formed and there was no thinking of chatting anymore... haha... on top of that, all our flights to Munich were delayed because of... yeah, you guessed it, bad weather. And finally, as if that wasn't enough they cancelled yet another flight, the last one to Hamburg. The aircraft was still in Madrid (hola Dani!) when it was supposed to be in Amsterdam already... The problem for us was that we did not have much alternatives because the competing airline was almost fully booked. But somehow we managed to rebook many passengers and in the end only few people had to go to a hotel and travel the next morning. But this all took very long and Iris and I as the only people on duty at the ticket counter were working nonstop, no pee-break, no break at all actually, hungry and thirsty and of course some complaining passengers. One female passenger was really pushing our adrenalin to the limit as she kept on complaining in the queue for at least an hour implying we were stupid and not capable of handling the situation, inefficient and so on... when she was finally helped by Iris she rushed away to get the alternative flight only to come back later and saying she could not get to the flight because she did not have a boarding pass - well lady, you should have listened that you had to check in before to get one... so who's the stupid one here? You can imagine that we had an inner laugh when we had to book that 'smart' woman into a hotel for the night... sigh...

Yesterday we had an internal meeting (the last for my feeling was at least a year ago or so...) and we spoke about some procedural things and changes and stuff. Finally, we also managed to speak about our new counter. We said, nicely, that the chairs at the counter are too low for the new, ergonomically incorrect because too high counter. Our boss replied they knew about it and were in discussion with the airport. From the airport we know that they refuse to give us new chairs. They simply don't care. That made me mad so I said to the boss that I would expect from my employer that he would take care of that, arrange new chairs so his employees are taken good care of and would arrange refund of the costs afterwards with the airport, in whatever way. I said the way it was handled now is simply on the backs of his employees and I can't understand why it is our problem. I would have hoped he as boss was interested in the health and well being of his employees. You could feel that he felt attacked and did not like at all that I was complaining and sure enough he said he was not going to spend money on new chairs because he thinks it's the responsibility of the airport (true, but it's not our problem either and it can't be that we have to wait for ages for a solution). These are all multi billion euro companies and surely they can afford to spend the little money for such things (as they are all making huge earnings) but they clearly prefer to fight it out between each other and on our backs just to save a few bucks... it's so sad and really makes me mad.

I guess this is something most of us experience in their daily work life, I'm sure there's not much difference nowadays. On top of it all, we don't have a work council at the moment because they resigned frustrated months ago and not many people want to engage in a new one... but legally, we are obliged to have one because of our size. I am really curious to see what happens. I already encouraged my colleague Sumita to be a candidate for it. I hope I can convince her. 

Okay, that's all about work. That feels good. I could get rid of it. :-)

On a positive side note I can tell that I am going to see "Sex and the City" tonight, together with Timo and Jelle. I look forward to it. In a few days the pre-premiers of "Mamma Mia!" will also start, on the 9th of July in Amsterdam obviously. I can't wait to see it either, yay!!!

This morning I got myself into a very good and happy and positive mood by watching the Hairspray blu-ray that I got from lilbro! "Good Morning Baltimore" and "You can't stop the beat" are so happy and positive, it's so much fun to listen and sing to it!!!

I hope you all have a great weekend, I don't have plans for it as I have to work. Enjoy everybody! Many hugs to you all.