July 12, 2022
Day 91: Frankfurt to Home (new version)
The Canadian government is adamant that to enter the country by air everybody has to use their app, called Arrivecan. With this you upload the image of your proof of vaccination, and without vaccination you basically are not coming. This sort of simple sounding proposition has a number of deep flaws. First, vaccination has now been revealed to be almost useless in keeping a person from being a carrier of the pandemic. Second, Canadians who were vaccinated in the first waves of vaccination (such as us) will now be reporting a history that begins in Spring 2021. Even if vaccination may have once had an effect on transmission, that vaccination history is now ancient history. And third, to make this irrelevant report by app, the app has to work!
I consider myself quite crafty in figuring out why computer things do not work, and what the 22 year programmer actually meant with the ambiguous, ungrammatic error message that the program vomits out. For example, "Please check that your username is correct" could easily mean "You are not connected to the internet", etc. etc.
Tech support for ArriveCan, who I phoned from Germany to Ottawa, was aware of these kinds of glitches. "Download the latest, error corrected, version of our app", "Type in your email address fresh and do not accept the pre inserted version your system may have provided", and "Use only the Chrome browser" (the only one we bothered to actually check our software on!). But no, I tried that and a pile of other tricks to no avail. As a result we headed to the airport with paper documentation. Paper! Yes, 22 year old programmer, the idea pushed by Gutenberg in 1450. Take a trip to Mainz and learn about it!
Because of the ArriveCan thing, and also the reports of chaos at airports like Frankfurt, we woke up at 4 a.m. for our scheduled 9:20 a.m. flight. The 10 euro taxi ride from the terminal was now 13 euros to go back, because, the driver explained, the route back was marginally longer than the reverse. Whatever! We arrive to find not chaos but almost total calm. So calm, we could not find a check-in desk. But we did have boarding passes on the phone and no checked luggage, so we went straight to security. Now how about this - security was good humoured, did not rush us, and was generally efficient!
Air Canada soon woke up enough to keep sending us emails reporting that the flight was delayed, and again, and that the gate was changed. We were glad of our Vodaphone SIM, because airport wifi generally did not want to connect. Their system is like in a number of hotels (you connect, but hope for a redirect to a login site) - but that's a different rant!
We found that the government has Air Canada working as the first line of attack in the ArriveCan thing, and everyone was repeatedly being asked for it. Many puzzled people got a brief explanation, and a drop kick of some type to go deal with it. Air Canada had also put Dodie and I in single seats at opposite ends of the aircraft. They had been willing to sell seat selection for 130 euros each (130 euros!), but since the flight was 100% full, you could not even buy a proper seat allocation. (Dodie put them straight on that, and we sat together - an amazing feat by her!). With the size of today's planes, a 100% full flight totally overwhelms the seating availability at the gate. Dodie played the old lady with two sticks card, and got a seat from a young girl. Good one!
The ten hour flight from Germany is long enough and tough enough that by the time you make it through, you can really expect everything to be different, and you know your wonderful trip is really over.
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1 year ago
1 year ago
One of the advantages of the long flight is the opportunity to watch movies on the Air Canada entertainment system. They actually did have the Matrix trilogy, and in Revolutions, agent Smith makes some comments on the Meaning of Life. I thought this was quite relevant, and not to prejudge what the Grampies may conclude in an upcoming post about the Meaning of Life based on the trip, here is what Smith and Neo had to say.
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Agent Smith : Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why? Why do you do it? Why, why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting... for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although... only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?
Neo : Because I choose to.
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Beth
1 year ago
1 year ago