Mandy and I spent five days in New York at the weekend, leaving Aidan at home to be spoilt by his granny and pop.
Weather was good (apart from one day when we got drenched by the remains of a tropical storm sweeping up the East Coast), food was good (only picked a sub-standard place to eat once) and shopping was pretty good too (though I was disappointed to discover that it's actually a little cheaper to buy Blu-ray and DVD from Amazon and have it ZipXed to Bermuda than it is to pick it up in a New York store). We got some culture in too, with trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, and met up with several friends. All in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable, stress-free getaway.
Reassuringly, however, there were still plenty of things for me to moan about, including:
- Moronic admissions policy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you have anything breakable in your bag (we had a bottle of rum we were giving to some friends as a present later in the day) you can't take it into the museum and can't check it in the cloakroom either. We were basically escorted from the museum by a security guard as a result. We were so mad (yes, even Mandy was pissed!), when we went back the next day we declined to pay the "recommended donation" of $20 each for admission and gave them $1 each instead, along with a letter explaining why. I'm sure they could care less, but hey, made us feel better.
- Ill-thought-out self-service check-in desks at JFK. You have to go to a computer terminal and enter a bunch of information to get your boarding pass, then join one of a multitude of lines to drop off your bags. However, the terminals and the lines were so close together it was all just a confused scrum with no-one to tell you where to go. We figured it out, but some people didn't, and ended up queuing for the bag drop before they'd got their boarding pass from the terminal.
- Rude flight attendant on the American Airlines flight back home. She was handing a glass of orange juice to Mandy to give to me, but let go of it before Mandy had hold. The juice went all over me and my book, absolutely soaking me. The flight attendant gave us a couple of napkins, then carried on serving drinks without an apology. We had to ask her for some more napkins, which still weren't enough to mop up the mess, but she'd gone on her way by that point. I went to the bathroom to clean up. When I was returning to my seat, I encountered her pushing the trolley down the aisle ahead of me, collecting empties. I waited behind her to get past. "Can you stand back a bit?" she snapped at me. As I was hardly right behind her, I lost my cool at this point. "Sorry, would hate to get in your way," I retorted. At this point she got right up in my face and told me she detected some "negative energy" from me. I told her I was unimpressed with her attitude after the drink was spilled on me. "That wasn't my fault," she said. "It was your girlfriend who dropped it". I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "What did you want me to do?" she continued. "Take you to the bathroom and wash you myself?". Congratulations, American Airlines, you have just ensured that should we have a choice we won't be flying with you again.
