The Anonymous Widower

The Same Name Problem

The two names I habitually use aren’t the most uncommon and I’ve met more than a few individuals, who use the same pair of names. I also own the .com domain for the names, which must give me a certain precedence.

But at registration for my P&O cruise, I found that I was not alone and because of this my account was changed to the first name that only my mother, my passport, HMRC and the DWP use. It worked after a fashion, although some staff seemed confused that I was travelling under a different name. But checking my statement after the cruise, there doesn’t seem to be any charges that I hadn’t made.

It did give me a bit of a problem with the wi-fi, as my Samsung tablet computer has my used name in its memory and always used that, which meant, there was a lot of typing at each login.

I have a feeling, that their system hasn’t had the requisite amount of testing.

You can always rely that when you program a computer, there will always be a set of obscure circumstances, that you feel will never happen.

But of course they will!

In this case of course they did, but no financial harm was done to any party involved. I just suffered the login inconvenience.

March 28, 2013 Posted by | Computing, Transport/Travel | , , | 2 Comments

Queues Are The Nature Of Travel

I went on a cruise a few days ago, which started at Southampton on the 18th of March. As I got to the terminal at the port to pick up my ship, I ended up in the queue for registration and boarding.

It then struck me that it is almost impossible to travel anywhere on anything without some form of queue.

In some ways the most queue-free travel, that I’ve used extensively is a light aircraft, although you often have to queue for taxi, take-off and landing. But I suspect that with this type of flying the proportion of time wasted is one of the lowest, except perhaps for walking.  But even walkers have to queue up to cross the road!

But not all pilots queue!

I remember, waiting to take-off back to the UK, after a day at Deauville races, when a large business jet owned by Allen Paulson; the entrepreneur and racehorse owner, passed the queue and took straight off, despite volumes of Gallic abuse from French Air Traffic Control. C who was sitting next to me at the time, thought the behaviour was very rude and even dangerous.

It certainly was the sort of behaviour that would often have resulted in a reprimand.

To return to my cruise, after the first queue, we then had to queue a second time to get through security to get on the ship.

Note that so all of the cruise posts can be viewed together they have been given a tag of X304.

March 28, 2013 Posted by | Transport/Travel | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Ship And The Itinerary

The cruise I went on was on the Oriana. It started and finished at Southampton and stops were to be in Corunna, Casablanca, Gibraltar, Cadiz and Lisbon.

As in everything, I had objectives.  These were getting a bit of sun and also looking at the sites in the stops.

One thing I didn’t do though, was enough preparation, but then in some ways that was always the way C and I planned our holidays.  We liked to see what turned up!

March 28, 2013 Posted by | Transport/Travel | , , , , , | 1 Comment