Posted 8 November 1994
Dear Folks,
I am settling in [at Cisco Systems UK] after a couple days here. I seem to be the first person in (as usual), and on Saturday I was one of only two people in the office (the other guy was an American as well). But this may indicate a different way of working more than anything else, since at Cisco they take this telecommuting business seriously. Everyone has a Macintosh PowerBook, and most people come into the office only when there are meetings. Otherwise they are on the road or working at home.
The entire company runs on voice mail and e-mail. The e-mail I like (we use the Internet, so in addition to communicating with fellow Cisco people I will be able to have up to 20 million additional correspondents), but voice mail I have never cared for.
For interactive conversations, Cisco prefers face-to-face meetings, so you are always being asked to fly out to Munich or somewhere for an afternoon just to attend a meeting. Meanwhile, there is an ISDN video conferencing system in this building, which I have yet to see used. Since I believe this will be an important technology in the future (and Cisco are helping to build the components needed by this technology), I am really looking forward to seeing this system in action.
On Sunday, I went to a braaivleis, probably my last one. Since the traffic is so bad, it is no faster to drive than to take the train, so Mary and I walked down to Surbiton station and got on a train for Waterloo.
Now Mary and I are not that familiar with the trains going out to Grove Park, where the braai is held, so we were perplexed by a video message at Waterloo East station about Orpington trains, among others, which we knew we needed to take. The message said simply that, due to the inevitable engineering works, these trains were running via Blackfriars. Now I wasn’t sure what the hell that meant, and of course there was no one at Waterloo East (a separate station from Waterloo) to ask. I finally deduced that the trains were starting at Blackfriars station instead of Charing Cross, and that we had to somehow get to Blackfriars (this was not obvious from reading the video messages, which was proved when on the way back to Waterloo proper we asked the only SWT employee we could find what was going on. He read the video message, thought hard for a few moments, then ventured tentatively that perhaps the Orpington trains were starting at Blackfriars).
The problem was now to get to Blackfriars. Well, we were standing on a train platform, what a great place to start. Perhaps we could take a train to Blackfriars. So I searched the entire plaffiorm for a map of the train system, and while there were many fine posters of exciting and historic destinations in the south of England which you could get to by train (if you were lucky), there was no map at all. We had to walk all the way back to Waterloo station to find a map, which told us we needed to use the Underground. So we took the Tube to Blackfriars, and found the special Orpington service which took us to Grove Park.
I recalled your effusive compliments of the British public transport system, which seems quite nice when you want to use it from time to time, but upon which you can’t really depend. And that’s the problem: No one can be expected to get out of his car and use the train or bus if the public service is not dependable (not that using a car is any more predictable in this country). I was fuming about this the entire time I was looking for a map, that it was the British attitude all over. I appreciated that the engineering works were done on a Sunday so there was less impact on commuters, but I am certain they are Band-Aid sort of repairs which will need to be re-addressed in another six months or so. The English are addicted to this half-assed wire-and-string way of doing things. It is obvious in every infrastructure project you see, from trains to motorways (widened every couple of years) to airports.
Which reminds me of another recent incident at Heathrow (where they are thinking of building a Terminal 5 instead of building a completely new passenger handling facility and abandoning the old terminals, which is how it would be approached in any other civilized country, even Orange County). A few weeks ago, one of the Newport Boyz, Craig, was coming over to set up and staff at the Paris NetWorld show. He was coming through Heathrow with a five-hour connection before meeting his Paris flight, so I said I would meet him at the airport and we would go out for a few hours before he caught his next flight. So Yacouta and I drove up from Surbiton (Yacouta was driving since the plan was to take Craig to a pub or two in Windsor).
Traffic getting into the airport was a mess. We were only able to meet the plane because Yacouta Suddenly became French the moment we hit congestion, so she wove rapidly among the cars, cutting people off at will, taking flagrant advantage of kindnesses offered, otherwise showing no quarter. She can get this way from time to time. When we got to the terminals we discovered the problem was all vehicular traffic to Terminal 3 (the intercontinental terminal where we were meeting Craig) had been closed off due to some kind of cave-in while working on the Tube line or something. I don’t know what. The point was, the only access to Terminal 3 was by foot, along the streets (the foot tunnels were closed). I jumped out of the car and ran to the terminal while Yacouta parked.
As it turned out, we never saw Craig, since he had been “detained” by HM Customs and Excise for attempting to smuggle in some electronic devices for the show, the export documentation for which appeared to be a flagrant fabrication (as it certainly was). They held him there for about three hours or so, and wouldn’t let us speak to him. I was rather irritated by this, since Craig obviously wasn’t a criminal and they knew it, just a businessman with some dodgy paperwork, who wasn’t even trying to bring the stuff into the UK for crying out loud, he was going to Paris. Meanwhile, that morning’s lot of terrorists and drug smugglers were waltzing on through the customs gate, not a care in the world. In the end, the customs people got real tough and said he could pay them £600 or remain in custody until they could arrange a trial. It took Craig about six nanoseconds to figure out what to do. They let him keep the stuff, but made him sign a paper in which he guaranteed they stayed in the EU. Huh? The point of the dodgy paperwork was that the stuff was only going to be in Europe for a show, then it was going back to the States. I think they needed the paper before they could legally get the money from Craig. If he had had a lawyer handy I’m sure things would have been different, but who cares about some alien? The whole things was probably a bit of a putup for a slow morning.
Before we get too smug, according to the Economist this sort of thing is rampant among foreigners trying to enter the USA. They appear to be routinely and randomly detained, harassed and in many cases sent back home, for no apparent reason whatever. Because the people don’t have US lawyers handy to advise them, all they can do is whatever the customs agents tell them to do. Also, because US customs agents are fairly honest by world standards, the hapless tourists can’t even pay them off; the customs staff act out of pure meanness.
Anyway, I asked Craig later what the hell he was doing bring that stuff through UK customs anyway. He should have had it checked through to Paris. He said he had some fear about it getting lost during the transfer. I said he really should have taken the chance and cleared it in Paris.
If he had been discovered in Paris, the French customs guy would have taken one look at the paperwork and decided he had better things to do; this looked complicated. At the worst, Craig could have argued with them. That’s always a last resort in France, argue with the guy. It is routine, for example, for French people to argue their way out of traffic violations.
But Craig’s misadventure is not the point of this story. The point of the story is that the intercontinental terminal in the busiest airport in the world was only accessible by foot, over pavements and roads which weren’t designed for foot traffic (since you normally use the tunnels). Since Terminal 3 is the intercontinental terminal, many of the passengers coming through there are immigrants, principally Indians and Pakistanis, and it was heartbreaking to see these people, the women in robes and saris, attempting to negotiate curbs and barriers with all their worldly possessions piled high on those flimsy Heathrow trolleys. Baggage was spilling all over the place. Meanwhile, since the aboveground areas are not sign-posted for pedestrians, people had only the most vague idea of where they were going. It was a mess. The only saving grace was that it was an atypically nice sunny day. Normal chances would have had it pissing down on everyone.
Think about this: Could you imagine the scene I just described at any other airport in any major city in any developed country? Neither can I.
Later, of course, once they released him, Craig had to take all his luggage and contraband over the curbs and barriers to catch his Air France flight at Terminal 2. Yacouta and I had long before left the airport when it was clear the customs people wouldn’t let us talk to him.
As I said, the Powers That Be are now looking into a fifth terminal which of course would mean more shuttling between terminals for travellers. And this is not trivial, since the new terminal would have to be fairly far away from the others. This is already a problem with Terminal 4, which is on the other side of the airport from the other Terminals, and which requires an extra half hour or so of connection time. Last week when I was connecting between Paris and Amsterdam I thought I was going to miss my flight for sure, since the Paris flight was late and I had to get from Terminal 2 to Terminal 4, which means waiting for a bus which comes only every ten or fifteen minutes or so, then taking a ten-minute bus journey across the airport.
What could be simpler, the non-English brain asks, than to build a new large terminal off away in some of the empty land which surrounds the airport, one large enough to handle all current and expected passenger traffic for the next, oh, thirty years? Sure, you could have different (adjacent!) terminals for aircraft boarding, but the checkin, security, customs and baggage handling should all be combined into a single facility. While you’re at it, perhaps you could build access ramps from the two major motorways which intersect within a couple miles of the airport (currently, the only road access is via surface streets, the ninnies).
Anyway, as I have said before, one of the reasons I am looking forward to moving to France is to finally stop depending upon Heathrow; I hate it. I am to move to France as soon as possible, which in fact means whenever I can find the time, which should be sometime within the next few months of next year.
Last year I think I wrote to you about Guy Fawkes Day, which is 5 November. This is the day the English set off all kinds of fireworks, like our Fourth of July only much colder. It’s noisier too, since you can fire off all kinds of firecrackers and rockets here in England. For the week leading up to Guy Fawkes, the evenings are punctuated by the booms of distant artillery or the crackle of small arms fire. Luckily, Guy Fawkes was on a Saturday this year, and so Yacouta and I went to a party with some friends of hers in Ascot, in Berkshire. All the guests were supposed to bring booze and fireworks, which meant it took something like an hour to light off everything in the back garden. And what a display! Nothing like the Fourth of July, no cones or anything like that (unless missiles shot out of them). Everything rocketed into the air, to whistle or burst in flashing colors, and ashes rained down the whole time. A lot of burning projectiles came alarmingly back to earth, often in the neighbors’ gardens, but since it had been raining all day and most of the evening, there was little worry about this. The entire display was really a treat.
I plan to be extremely busy in the next few weeks, so I don’t think you will be receiving many letters from me in the days ahead. Hang in there.
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