Live from Austin!

It appears I have located another job within IBM. What’s more, it’s one that’s entirely suited to my skill set, in the technical sales part of the organization. My appetite has come back with a vengeance.

On Saturday we went on a day trip to Dallas. Kind of insane if you look at the map, but [rothko] had a business meeting, and I didn’t want her to have to drive for 8 hours given her tendonitis. Plus, I needed some distraction from my work situation.

We met up with [stick_figure] and had some lunch; then [rothko] took the Prius to Arlen—er, Garland—and [stick_figure] and I went to the aquarium.

If you know me, you can probably guess the big appeal of the aquarium: otters. In fact, the Dallas World Aquarium is the only place in the US to have el lobo del rio, the Giant River Otter of the Amazon. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a 5′ otter.

Dealey Plaza was a strange experience. It’s more or less exactly as it was in 1963. The picket fence is still there, with the car park behind it.

Remember the statue of Saddam being pulled down? The Guardian has tracked down the people who were there and interviewed them. The men with the rope noose were Ali Fares and Khaled Hamid.

Hamid says: “We weren’t able to catch Saddam himself, so the statue had to stand in. I was happy. I was proud. I know that even President Bush was watching us.” But the pride was tinged with revulsion. “To be honest, I was upset about the Americans coming. Nobody accepted the occupation. But we were ready to be allied with the Jews, with Satan, just to get rid of Saddam.”

[…]

“The Americans should leave our country, but I’m 100% sure they’re not going to. They came all this way. They experienced all that sacrifice, lost hundreds of men and spent so much money. Do you think they will leave this country so easily? No. There will be American bases outside our cities.”

Both were military deserters.

“We’re depressed and we’re frustrated,” says Fares. “We thought the coalition forces came here for reconstruction, for the prosperity of the people. It hasn’t happened. I was glad to get rid of Saddam, but that doesn’t mean I like the Americans. I don’t regret pulling down his statue, because if I hadn’t done it somebody else would have, but if the situation had remained as it was under Saddam I personally would have been better off now.”

But I digress, because the beautiful part is this:

Later, Khaled takes me across the road to visit a friend, Hussein Abdul Bari Obeid, whose house was broken into by US troops on a raid on Eid, the last day of Ramadan. […] Three American soldiers entered the yard, told Obeid and his friends to put their hands up while they searched for weapons, took hold of Obeid’s chin, moved his head from side to side, and ordered him to take his shirt off and stand facing the wall. He refused. He was handcuffed and taken into the street. Against a background of screaming, weeping and protesting by the family, male and female, the Americans broke into the house and searched it, finding two Kalashnikovs, which they confiscated, although Obeid insisted he needed at least one for his job as watchman at a car park.

“After that, the American officer untied me. I didn’t say anything. They wrote some words on my forearm, three lines: the day, the date, the kind of weapon, the serial number. Then the officer said: ‘Happy Eid!’ And he left.”

Later, another US unit came through with a kind of “How’s my driving?” mopping-up operation, asking locals whether the first unit had treated them courteously. They handed out leaflets with an Arabic translation of a speech by George Bush talking about the spirit of peace and love in Ramadan.

“Well, they gave me this paper, but they hadn’t respected their own president,” says Obeid. “They went into my house with their shoes on and they pointed a gun at my mother. That wasn’t done under Saddam. We were repressed, and now we’re going to be repressed again.”

Gunpoint interrogation satisfaction surveys. It’s like something out of “Brazil”.

[Previously “friends only"]

Even you haven’t been on a plane since September, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that the entire experience was awful.

It started at the airport, where less than half the check-in booths were staffed, and even the e-ticket counters had a long line of people. The terminal had been rearranged, and new walls added, to funnel everyone through one security checkpoint. Naturally there were only two scanners operating, resulting in more long lines. In addition to scanning, I was patted down, checked with the metal-detector wand, and my bag was drug-tested.

When they started boarding the plane, they checked everyone’s paperwork and ID cards a third time, and used the metal detector wand (again) on a few randomly-selected victims. Naturally they only had one person checking, and didn’t allow any extra time for the process—just the usual fifteen minutes. Hence the plane was guaranteed to be late taking off.

Leafing through the in-flight magazine, I learned that for security reasons we wouldn’t be served a meal, or coffee. Presumably it’s just too much of a risk that someone might take over the plane, armed with a plastic fork and a flimsy polystyrene cup of hot liquid.

When we arrived in Minneapolis, there was another twenty minute wait for the baggage to be unloaded. When it finally appeared, it appeared a few bags at a time, stretched over another twenty minutes or so. After a long time, it became clear that one of our suitcases wasn’t going to turn up. We joined another long queue to talk to the lost baggage staff, and gave them the relevant details.

We then tried to leave the airport. More than half of the exit ramps from the car park were unstaffed, and we had to sit in the car, inching forwards, for another twenty to twenty-five minutes.

The common element, of course, is drastic cost-cutting and massive understaffing—the result of the huge layoffs after September 11th. You might be given to wonder what happened to all the bailout money we (the taxpayers) gave the airlines—the tickets weren’t any cheaper than usual, clearly they didn’t spend it so that they could keep adequate staffing levels, and none of it went to the people laid off, so the only possible conclusion is that it’s going straight into the pockets of high-level management at the various airlines.

The next day, I called to see if they’d found the missing suitcase. The automatic voicemail message said to press 1 if I was calling about baggage I’d left on a plane less than five weeks ago, or to press 2 if I was calling about baggage I’d left on a plane more than five weeks ago. Conspicuously absent was an option to push if the damn airline had lost my suitcase.

Calling the local airport in Rochester was more successful; it has such a small staff anyway that presumably there wasn’t anyone they could lay off. We got to talk to an actual human being, who said my case was there. We went and collected it. They’d given me a voucher worth $25 off a flight, but only if spent before May. Gee, thanks.

I was lucky enough to visit Russia about a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the summer of 1993. My girlfriend at the time had lived and studied in Leningrad, and had made friends with a family there. We decided to go visit them.

Day 1

We arrive at Leningrad airport. It has “ST PETERSBURG” on the top in obviously brand new letters.

I see row after row of identical Aeroflot planes. Our British Airways plane taxis for about half a kilometer around the outside of the old ‘external’ airport, to the main airport building. Apparently now that people can travel, they don’t feel a need to physically separate international and domestic flights.

The plane stops and sits for a while. Eventually, someone comes back, having found some steps. Some soldiers stand and watch us as we disembark.

We fill out some customs forms to declare what we’re bringing into the country. The form is an old USSR one, and it’s fairly obvious that nobody is taking customs very seriously any more; they just make us complete the official Soviet paperwork because, well, it’s their job, and they haven’t been told to do anything else. Their asses having been covered, we clear customs and immigration quite quickly.

We meet up with Olga, her husband Alexei, and their daughter Natasha. We learn that Alexei’s car has broken down, and the garage has refused to even try to repair it, saying it needs a new body. Hence, we find ourselves squeezing onto a yellow bendy bus full of Russians.

The electric bus rattles along the streets, which could apparently use some maintenance. They look brown and dusty. The ballast of the bus’s electrical system is apparently completely shot, and the back of the bus is filled with an eerie electronic whining noise that rises and falls in pitch depending on what the bus is doing. This turns out to be a common feature of Russian buses; I name it “The Song Of The Lonely Bus” and find myself wishing I had a tape recorder…

We switch to the Metro. When the train arrives there are doors in the walls which open up, followed by the doors of the train a few moments later. I find myself wondering if the two sets of doors ever fail to line up.

Ascending from the Metro by escalator is rather like the stairway to heaven scene in the classic movie “A Matter Of Life And Death”. Unlike the Underground in London, there are no posters here to give a sense of scale; when you look to the side, the lights continue as far as the eye can see.

The apartment block where Olga and family live looks a lot like the ones in East Berlin—but even more so. The outside is run down, crumbling, faded and shabby. The stairwells are unlit—the lights have been ripped out. The lift isn’t working. We walk up to the fourth floor. I notice a faint smell of urine in the stairwell, like Watford car park. We climb nine flights of stairs in all.

I’m a bit nervous as to what we’ll find, but the apartment turns out to be nice inside, though very obviously Eastern Europe.

Olga and Alexei have moved into the main room, and given me and XQ the bedroom. Olga’s mother and Natasha are sleeping in the remaining room. The “bathroom” is a shower that has been bolted onto the side of the kitchen by Alexei.

This is, by Russian standards, a luxury apartment. Three whole rooms, plus a kitchen! Originally this was three separate communal apartnments with a shared kitchen. Olga’s family got the other two when their neighbors moved out; fortunately for them they had connections, and grandma survived the Siege of Leningrad, so the second time they applied for more space they managed to get preferential treatment because of her war hero status and the fact that they had a child.

It’s time to eat, and we are given special treats: fresh fish to start with; sprats, to be precise. Unfortunately the main course turns out to be some kind of meat dish in jelly.

I had already decided that I would give up being vegetarian for the duration of the trip. It’s hard enough for Russian families to get food at all, without putting crazy demands on them. So I try to eat the jellied meat, really I do. I just can’t manage it, though. I’ve always had a problem with anything that has a texture like fat, and the jelly sets off my gag reflex. I realize that if I try to force it down, I’ll end up vomiting. I opt to survive on bread and vegetables.

We go out at 1a.m. and find that it’s still light. We walk down to the riverfront and watch the bridges to the island being raised. Wispy clouds drift in front of the moon, moonlight sparkles on the water, and the gilded dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral glitters against the blue-orange sky. A ship passes through the bridge.

Alexei has a Russian clone of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as well as a radiation meter and a four band (shortwave) radio. Natasha tries to teach me the alphabet for a while, then we all go to bed.