KL 2010: The Return

Of course, I get to spend some time in Delhi airport again first. Sheeesh.
I walk out of the airplane and straight towards the transfer desk, but am stopped by an angry soldier who, in barely intelligible English, tells me to go back and contact the airline. Going back I am waved down the rolling escalator towards Immigration with everybody else, and after some asking around, told to “wait here”. With a bunch of others. “For whom, or for what, were they waiting?” Apologies to Manowar for the quote from “The Warrior’s Prayer”, and of course the answer proved much less interesting. What we were waiting for turns out to be someone else, with a handwritten note on which there were the names of some, though not all, of our group. We were told to follow this person, who, via a different route, though past the same soldier, takes us to the same transfer desk. At which, again, and predictably, we are told to wait. I’m used to this now, so just remark that I prefer to wait in the business lounge and walk off.
This time I’m outbound on Air India, so told to go to *their* business lounge. Which, I am sad to report, compares unfavourably to any I’ve seen so far, including Malawi and Papua New Guinea. Of course, the floors are marble (if in need of cleaning), but even cheap carpet reduces noise. They’ve got a telly on, of course, and it looks as though it’s the same stupid cricket game still going on. Sunday to Wednesday – that’s actually possible, I guess.
A young attendant practically forces his help on me to get an internet connection established and then, predictably, asks for a tip. I pass him a dollar note, seeing as I know I couldn’t have gotten one established without such help, though his vocal disappointment at the size of the tip fails to move me. This place is just as loud, and cold, as the other lounge was, but it’s smaller, the restrooms are decidedly unappetizing and the food on offer isn’t much better. I’m glad I don’t actually have to get something done, these are not conducive circumstances.
When nearly an hour before the flight no one has come to issue me a boarding pass yet, I go up to the front to inquire and meet an apparently recently arrived gentleman in the process of accosting random strangers to find out if they might be the individual whose name he’s got on yet another handwritten note. Which proves to be mine.
I am, again, asked to follow and duly do so – our way takes us past all manner of other travellers, half of which this person seems to know well enough to chivvy in one direction or another. One man stops us to (apparently) shout abuse at my guide (something about his bag, which looks alright to me) and after a number of similarly strange intercessions I am brought back to that same old transfer desk (I had suspected this by now). Where a heated conversation ensues between various people, sounding a lot like “^vS@fg$% ;"#[\ boarding pass hjx&” going back and forth in various shades of hostility. I am, in the end, issued a boarding pass, and, along with another woman we’ve picked up at the transfer desk seemingly at random, brought to yet another gentleman who compares my name to yet another handwritten list. He’s asked the woman in front of me for her name (while looking at her passport) – I’ve got a snide answer to that on my lips when, instead, he asks me where I’m going. While looking at my boarding pass.
They then take us to identify our baggage (I had found it worrying the first time around that they’d ask me to describe my luggage, which the Air India personnel in DC had assured me was checked through to Kuala Lumpur). Sure enough, in an unsupervised corral of baggage sits my trolley, with the KL-issued bar code tag on it that says “KUL - IAD” (IAD for Dulles airport in DC). My guide is happy about this and produces another bar code tag which he attaches to it. As it also says “IAD” (though preceded by “DEL”), I don’t object. He then tells me that now I am “free”. It’s half an hour before boarding time, so I head back to the lounge for a snack and to begin writing this down. Shortly thereafter, on my way to the aircraft, I am made to go through scanners twice, hand-searched twice, my hand luggage is scanned twice, and my passport and boarding pass are requested and regarded by five separate people with attitudes varying from intense scrutiny through boredom to cursory neglect.
What strikes me about the whole process is that in the end, all of these handwritten notes were produced somewhere ahead of time, before the individual in question had actually met me. Which proves that the e-ticket booking had in fact created a representation of all the necessary data here in Delhi before my arrival. That they could (and did) produce a bar-coded baggage tag for my suitcase means that there are machines somewhere that handle bar codes, and that they knew about my bag beforehand. So why, in the Hindi thousand (or thereabouts) gods’ names, do a dozen people have to consult handwritten notes? This is where we outsource our IT development to? Really?
If this was a place busy dragging itself out of abject poverty, I wouldn’t complain. And now that I’m in my almost full-flat seat for the return flight, I’ll stop complaining.