Plane crazy

Modern life is so permeated with technology that it’s easy to forget what it’s like to live without it. It’s hard to imagine life without the internet, for example. No email, no Facebook, no Amazon, no YouTube. No free information on any subject you can think of. In fact, without networked computers, modern life would be very different.

And while consumers depend on their computers and network connections, they’re critical for businesses. This fact was demonstrated spectacularly at Gatwick airport a couple of weeks ago. I arrived in good time to check in for my flight, but the queues were enormous and moved incredibly slowly.

Only when I made it to the desk the best part of an hour later did I find out the reason why – the computer systems were all offline. The check-in staff could barely cope with the resulting melee, as they had to resort to hand-writing all boarding cards and share a single sheet of stickers containing all the plane’s seats. Without computers, and with a single sheet of stickers per flight, there was no way to check multiple passengers in to a flight at once, meaning I had to wait at the desk until the sheet of stickers arrived with the guy behind it, and only then could he peel the 14A sticker off and attach it to my boarding card.

As you’d expect, this caused severe delays and – needless to say – we missed our take-off slot. This turned a three-hour flight into a five-hour one: precisely what I didn’t want when travelling abroad for the first time with my 14-month-old daughter.

Fortunately, the consequences of this computer failure weren’t disastrous – it merely made thousands of people angry and late – but it serves to highlight just how much we rely on technology these days.