© barkbud (Flickr)

Granted, most of these chasms we created ourselves when we created silos between channels – competition even. When executives asked the online channel to compete with the call centre, the mobile channel with the good old websites…. They cooked the soup they now have to eat. (this is a German idiom that doesn’t translate well but I just love the picture…)

Some companies are doing an excellent job at connecting all channel touchpoints in a smooth and consistent way. These are companies who figured out the customer journey and took a good hard look at themselves through the customer’s eyes. KLM is one of those companies who “get it” and I am always impressed how well KLM executes on their customer experience strategy.

When I travel for business, my tickets usually get booked via travel agency through our office management – either online or with the agency call centre. I then get a confirmation and eticket from the agency via email. At pretty much the same time, connected via the loyalty program, the booking shows up in the KLM mobile app on my phone. From here – or, if I chose, from the KLM website – I can trigger status updates for my flights via email or SMS – it is MY choice. And, on a side note, in the language that I chose.

I check in online, of course, and send the fancy barcoded boarding pass to my phone. And to my tablet, because I am a bit paranoid about losing or forgetting either one of them. Sometimes, I have problems with the check-in and then I call the hotline and they know right away what’s going on and help me through.
At the airport, I tend to ask for a print-out of the boarding pass. That’s because once my phone ran out of battery power and I had left my tablet in the office. And that made me look really stupid at boarding – thus the paranoia.

Just recently, I was coming back from London to Amsterdam, and the fog in Amsterdam meant that we ran late by about an hour or so. I knew straight away from my mobile updates and hit the airport’s retail therapy, which at LHR is a pleasure. But when we landed on the furthest runway in Amsterdam (which is soo far away that it’s almost Belgium and taxying takes 20 minutes… For a 1 hour flight..) and I got home just after midnight, I was a little bit cranky. Not really with KLM, because they neither made the fog nor the Polderbaan runway (or did they?), but just with the situation as such.

And then, at home, my phone beeps at me and there was an email from KLM. It said that they are sorry about the delay and that they hope it didn’t cause me any inconvenience. And somehow that really made it better for me. It was so nice they cared. So I tweeted how cool I thought that was. And guess what, KLM replied straight away to say thank you and that they were glad it all worked out in the end.

Wow. Seriously, how awesome is this? The entire customer journey glued together by e-ticket, booking code and customer loyalty program. Customer Experience Management at it’s best.

What is KLM doing right?
Firstly, they understand what’s going on with their customers at the different stages of their journeys.

Secondly, they invested some serious thought and money into making this journey more pleasant for their customers.

Thirdly, they make use of all the channels they got, employing each channel for the right thing – forming one consistent brand image.

Last but not least, they encourage dialogue through their social channels – and by that create brand ambassadors who share how awesome KLM is.

Thank you, KLM, for this great example.

Guest Post

Sonja Keerl 
Sonja is in the online business since 1999 and a passionate voice for Customer Experience Management. She has helped many large global companies with CMS implementations, global rollouts and multichannel strategy. Sonja frequently speaks on industry events. Sonja currently works for SDL WCM as Senior Product Marketing Manager and is engaged to Julian.

There are allot of use cases that might be applicable to you using the information stored with all publishing jobs so it might be worth while picking up the documentation and taking a look. Between 2009 and 2011 .NET APIs there have been allot of improvements but the main one is that in 2011 you can access all data from API calls rather than loading up the publish transaction XML and surgically picking out what you want to know.

One use case that I know the best here is measuring the performance of the content being rendered. For a customer, we wanted to know how quickly everything was being rendered on a per item basis. We also wanted to gather data for longer term analysis (e.g. are we improving the overall performance on a day to day basis). To do this, we extract the data from the queue for a given day in a pipe separated format for import into excel. Overtime we have built a very complete picture of the growth and performance of publishing.

Now before I dive into code I have to declare that I am not a programmer, I am a Technical Account Manager which was likened last week to being retired from being a consultant. So my skills are not as good as some people I could mention (in fact those that implied that I was retired from useful things). However, it works! And for this that is the most important thing.

So, to look into the queue items you need to do the following steps:

1. Get the queue transaction list and loop it
2. For each transaction get the transaction itself
3. Dig around for details

In detail this looks something like…

Get the queue transaction list and loop it…

We need to start a session, get the list, get the XML document and then the nodes. This is the only XML related thing you have to do which is the plus over the 2009 API.

Session TridionSession = new Session(RemoteUser);
XmlElement QueueTransactionElement = TridionSession.GetList(typeof(PublishTransaction), QueueFilter);
XmlDocument QueueItems = QueueTransactionElement.OwnerDocument;
QueueNodes = QueueItems.SelectNodes(“tcm:ListPublishTransactions/tcm:Item”, GetNamespace(QueueItems.NameTable));

Lastly we loop the QueueNodes in a nice For loop.

Get the transaction

To get the transactions we need the TCM URI of the publish transaction (job) and then get the transaction object:

transactionId = tpq.QueueNodes.Item(i).Attributes["ID"].Value;
PublishTransaction publishTransaction = (PublishTransaction) TridionSession.GetObject(transactionId);

Digging Around in the mud

The transaction

So now we can see what we can get from a transaction. Let’s start with the basics and let’s assume we are just looking at successful publishing jobs.

So starting with some general details:

The Transaction ID: publishTransaction.Id

The ID of item being published: publishTransaction.Items.First().Id – This reveals the development path of the API, this is only ever one item but still there is an collection of items.

The Item Type being published: publishTransaction.Items.First().Id.ItemType

The title of the item being published: publishTransaction.Items.First().Title.ToString()

The priority: publishTransaction.Priority.ToString()

The purpose: publishTransaction.Instruction.ResolveInstruction.Purpose.ToString() – This is either publish or unpublish. According to the documentation, it should have a “re-publish” state but I can’t see to get this to work

Who published: publishTransaction.Creator.Title.ToString()

Duration:

dateTransactionStart = publishTransaction.Instruction.StartAt;
dateLastStatusChange = publishTransaction.StateChangeDateTime;
tsDuration = dateLastStatusChange – dateTransactionStart;

The tsDuration is now how long our job took to complete from start (the time it went into the queue) to the end (the time it’s status was changed to “success”).  If you submitted allot of jobs at once, then for some this time would be long because it includes queuing time.

The job itself

Within the transaction is the context. The context is holding the actual job itself; so for instance it contains details on the items the job resolved to.

To get the context is available as publishTransaction.PublishContexts

We can then…

Get the count of the processed items: transactionContext.ProcessedItems.Count

The publication: transactionContext.Publication.Title.ToString()

The Publication Target name:  transactionContext.PublicationTarget.Title.ToString()

The processed items

Then within the context we have processed items which we can loop around and get yet more details:

The processed item id: processedItem.ResolvedItem.Item.Id

The time it took to render: processedItem.RenderTime.Milliseconds

The template id it was rendered against (if applicable): processedItem.ResolvedItem.Template.Id

The item type of the processed item: processedItem.ResolvedItem.Item.Id.ItemType.ToString()

We can of course do things like add all the render times up and make some more numbers and if we subtract it from our duration I mentioned higher up, we can get an estimate on how much time was take to deploy (everything else but rendering).

Summing it up…

As you can see there is a wealth of information in the publishing transaction data and this was just the detail I needed for my purposes. I suspect there is allot more in there and playing around with the API is somewhat like Digital Archeology. To help you out I’ve added the scripts I use for measuring publishing on SDL Tridion 2011 SP1 which you can download, play with and even use to collect your readymade statistics!

Download QueueView2011_v0.3. This is an alpha release and requires additional work to make it production ready.

I started out as a real technology geek. I was nuts about computers, the Internet and everything that made it work.

Today, I love to think about the business challenges that drive the technology, about the marketing opportunities it offers and the customer experiences it can create. Rarely does pure technology still get my blood boiling, but now and then I still get ridiculously excited.

Cloud computing is such a tremendously exciting technology to me. I have been following the cloud development in the last year and it pains me to see that many marketing leaders still don’t quite see the benefit of it. Granted, cloud washing – the abuse of the term ‘cloud’ for any old story, just because it’s cool – has a lot do to with it and I don’t like to see all the fluffy confusing marketing B£#%{ that more often than not comes with it.

But: For CXM professionals and online marketing leaders, cloud technology has the potential to totally transform the way we are doing business. Here my top three exciting cloud opportunities for online marketing:

Time to market

In the 13 years that I am following large scale online projects, the first big hurdle has always been to get the infrastructure up and running. No matter how good the internal IT procurement and processes, with all the signatures and delivery timeframes, getting started with the actual physical hardware usually is a matter of weeks. Weeks that nobody has time to lose.

WHAT IF you could start within hours? What if from the time you get the go for your new campaign website or micro site until when you can get to work, is a matter of minutes? That’s what a cloud ready CMS does for you. It’s called ‘rapid deployment’ or ‘rapid provisioning’ or a few other terms with ‘rapid’. What it means is, there is a new server or entire environment pre-built and all you have to say is: one of that, please. That’s going to make your organization a lot more agile.

Protecting your investments

amazon.com CTO Dr. Werner Vogels said it so nicely at the Cloud Expo Europe 2012: “In offline business, our biggest fear used to be that nobody shows up. In online business, our biggest fear is that EVERYBODY shows up.” That is sooo very true.

When you put serious money into your marketing campaigns, can you afford your sites to be slow? Or even go down? When you find that golden egg and your campaign goes viral, can you afford to lose face and not be able to deliver? When you hit the news or your customers need you in the moment of crisis, can you afford to leave them in the dark? Of course not. You might as well flush your budget down the toilet.

WHAT IF you could have the guarantee that – no matter how much traffic – your sites will always be up and performing well? If you wouldn’t  have to fear being ‘too’ successful? Didn’t have to supersize your webfarm? That’s another thing the cloud does for you. It’s called ‘elasticity’. It means that your line of servers can expand and contract(!) automatically, based on the capacity needed to meet your requirements. That means you got your business continuity covered and can be sure to always deliver a well performing customer experience.

More money left at the end of your budget

Truth now, how much of your capacity is idling about the data centre, waiting for that hour of peak traffic for 23 hours a day, merrily keeping your maintenance team and the air condition busy and the electricity meter turning? How often did you expect the big run on your website with a campaign but it didn’t quite get as crowded as you hoped and now you are stuck with lots of hardware that you don’t need but that isn’t appreciated?

WHAT IF you only paid for what you are using and when you are using it? If you could just hand hardware back when you don’t need it anymore at no cost at all? The cloud does also that for you – ‘usage based pricing’. what it means is that you pay per hour for the hardware you are using – and not a minute longer.  A bit like the way your water supply works. It saves you hours of calculating and guessing work and for websites with volatile traffic, it saves a lot of money too.

So you see, cloud computing isn’t just for IT and geeks, but is a totally new canvas for online and marketing professionals. And that’s only my top three reasons! There is many more.

How can cloud technology help you to do a better job? Let me know!

Guest Post

Sonja Keerl 
Sonja is in the online business since 1999 and a passionate voice for Customer Experience Management. She has helped many large global companies with CMS implementations, global rollouts and multichannel strategy. Sonja frequently speaks on industry events. Sonja currently works for SDL WCM as Senior Product Marketing Manager and is engaged to Julian.

Actually, it’s not. It’s so much more than these three letters could possibly express. It’s really putting the customer in the centre of your attention and wondering about what that customer needs and wants – rather than to trick him into clicking the next available button. It’s exercising empathy and outside-in thinking. It’s the renaissance of servitude. It might not be new to everybody, but as an acknowledged movements it drastically changes the way companies relate to their customers.

But why would we need that? Why now? It’s quite simple – it’s the changed expectations of today’s online consumer. You don’t understand? Let me take you on a journey.

Sonja in 1994

My internet journey started in 1995. I was in high school in the Bavarian Forrest, Germany, and that meant zero internet access. In 1995, if you were not at University or had a really geeky CEO, you had to go through quite some effort or spend serious money to go online. But I wanted to go online soooo badly. The possibility of everybody on the globe being connected, to exchange ideas, to work together for the greater good – that was such a powerful picture in my teenage head, i just HAD to be part of it.

So… This is what I did in 1995 to go online:

I was 16 and I had a valid US driver’s license at the time. And my mother had a car. But she was a bit difficult with the keys – so I told her “mother, I must go forth and study at the library in town!”. Glad to have such a good daughter, my mom let me use her car. So I hit the German autobahn (yeah, 16 and no speed limit, talk about that!) and drove to the nearest university. That was Regensburg and a good hour away. Without speed limit.

I sneaked my way onto campus and found the math & physics faculty. No offence to anybody, but those guys seemed to me the easiest victims for a 16 yr. old.

I slipped into the building behind some student who didn’t pay enough attention and went into the general direction of the computer pool. There, I looked for the weakest link and flirted with (read: harassed) some poor chap until he would give me his username and password, which I would use to log on to one of the terminals. Luckily for me, identity fraud wasn’t much of a topic back then. I spent the next couple of hours chatting on the IRC (ahhh…. how 1337 was that?) and surfing the web. I was in heaven. Go on, judge me. But let’s agree: EASY it was not.

Now, do you remember what I did that for? Do you remember, what the Internet LOOKED like in 1995? That wasn’t cool, that wasn’t exciting. That was – lets face it – crap.

But to me it looked different. To me it was magic. I was happy to cope with the fact that things were difficult and a it clunky. I didn’t mind that I had to wait a minute for a website to load if it came from somewhere far at. I enjoyed surfing around for hours for that little piece of valuable information in the midst of lots of animated gifs. I was so thrilled that I was connected at all , I felt so privileged, I didn’t dare to complain.

I apologise, if you are born post 1990 – I know I am getting old… But trust me, most of your colleagues will have some crazy story about how they went online in those early years, how difficulty and slow and crappy that experience was. They can probably still imitate the sounds of their modem. That’s still a fun past time – guess how much Baut the modem had from the dial up sounds. Sorry, I forgot, past 1990 – “what’s Baut?”

Anyway, Today, we expect websites to be there in a split second. And not just on our desktop computer at home but also on the go, on our phones and tablets. And when the page is there, we make up our mind within a few seconds if that particular website is interesting for us or not. We don’t enjoy digging around for information, we want what matters right away – and ONLY what matters, whiteout all the background noise.

We expect online services to be available at all times, in all circumstances, fast and relevant or else we turn away.

And that’s precisely what has changed – Internet is reduced to a medium, not exciting in itself, but a commodity to find relevant information, products and services.

What is relevant to you though, isn’t necessarily relevant to me. And thats why we online professionals have to take the time to sit and think about our audiences and what makes our stuff relevant to them – more relevant than our competition’s stuff.

The answer to that is Customer Experience Management. It’s not a product, not even technology. It’s a philosophy, a strategy and a promise to your customers.

What are you doing to create a better experience for your customers?

Guest Post

Sonja Keerl 
Sonja is in the online business since 1999 and a passionate voice for Customer Experience Management. She has helped many large global companies with CMS implementations, global rollouts and multichannel strategy. Sonja frequently speaks on industry events. Sonja currently works for SDL WCM as Senior Product Marketing Manager and is engaged to Julian.

This year, rather than just attending I will be part of the community panel that will engage and discuss website related matters with anyone who is interested. I do this, I guess, on a daily basis to even those who are not interested so it will be good to do this in such a great session as I hope we are going to have.

Kicking off the session will be CMS community glitterati, Ian Truscott, who will share the future of the SDL Tridion platform. Then we will follow that with a discussion with community panel (Chris Summers, Frank van Puffelen and Nuno Linhares) on pretty much any topic relating to Tridion that the audience wants to raise. Last year I met some really interesting people who had lots of interesting questions and I hope that there will be a similar group with which to discuss Tridion.

If you are a SDL customer and have not yet decided if you want to join the conference, I can strongly encourage you to do so and don’t forget to attend our session! You’ll find us towards the end of the day on Tuesday 6 March.

You can follow the goings on at SDL Innovate via their twitter hashtag.

It is fair to say that SDL Tridion, like most CMS systems, is not a PIM and should not be used as one. It is a Web Content Management System and as such its purpose is to allow any organization to create, manage and publish marketing content. PIMs hold a specific type of content which is product data, they vary in what they store but almost certainly the minimum that a PIM stores is product combination or SKU. The number of SKUs an organization has will depend on the amount and type of products. Simple products, e.g. cups tend to have fewer SKUs that say laptops; but in both cases it could amount to many thousands or many millions of possible product combinations. Add to this, SKUs change over time as products are updated or changed as manufacturing parts change or just new products are added.

When looking at integrating a PIM you need to have a careful look at the content stored and how that should be used.  Additional content that could be stored in the PIM could be things like product description and this content will need to be looked at in detail. Is it needed on the website? I it translated? Is it localized? On your website you will want to present a combination of this product content and your marketing content; in different places on your website this content will vary in what the mixture is. But, overall you will want to show a uniform brand and content experience.

How you integrate this content together should be a matter of careful decisions and I will run through three simple scenarios and some basic pros and cons that will help guide that choice.

Importing Product Data into Tridion
Importing product data into Tridion should be seen as the bottom rung of choices for an integration. We assume that the PIM is the master of the product content, if we import this content there will be two copies of the same content so in this scenario we should really decide if we are going to do something with this imported content (e.g. Translation). If we are, this scenario might make sense but, if importing this PIM content into Tridion it only really makes sense if the number of products is low and the number of updates (the delta) is also low.

Pros

• Localization and translation of product content possible from within the CMS
• Marketing has complete control over the content presented on the environment (from a single system)

Cons

• Content import could be complex to implement
• Updates need to be published

Integration at publish time
Rather than importing content, we can consider the approach of merging the product content with our marketing content when it is published. For this our marketing content must be tagged or reference in some way to related it to which product it belongs. The templates then render the combination of marketing content and product content together as the pages are published to the website. To relate content to product there are two choices; 1) a product taxonomy in Tridion either created by hand or imported from the PIM or 2) a manual entry of the product ID in the content metadata either completely by hand or helped along with a lookup calling out to the PIM. I personally prefer the taxonomy approach but the automated import of a complex hierarchy will have to be thought out well in advance.

Pros

• Great for static content websites
• Good for when a PIM is not available directly to the websites
• Marketing content is easily kept in sync with product content (on publish)

Cons

• Updates to product content require a republish of both sets of content

Integration at runtime
The last major choice would be to integrate the marketing and product content at runtime. This requires use to have some application logic on our website and we’ll still need a way of linking the content we are looking at to the product; we could still use our product taxonomy idea but we could also use other ways such as URL. In essence, we do the same level of integration as we did at publish time only one stage later.

Pros

• Possible to implement more complex website functionality (e.g. product compare)

Cons

• Product content can get out of sync with marketing content (e.g. available colours)
• Requires a PIM or a sub section of it, to be available directly to the website

Did I miss some pros or cons or another scenario completely? Let me know in the space below!

What is Splunk?
I think the chaps from Splunk explain that the best…

Splunk is the engine for machine data. Use Splunk to collect, index and harness the fast moving machine data generated by all your applications, servers and devices — physical, virtual and in the cloud. Search and analyze all your real-time and historical data from one place.
Splunking your machine data lets you troubleshoot problems and investigate security incidents in minutes, not hours or days. Monitor your end-to-end infrastructure to avoid service degradation or outages. Meet compliance mandates at lower cost. Correlate and analyze complex events spanning multiple systems. Gain new levels of operational visibility and intelligence for IT and the Business.

Cool… but then why is this nice?
Traditional support organizations supporting large web farms often have monitoring in place and then when something goes wrong they go to the server and search the logs until they have the reason for the failure. At the bare minimum, which is where I am at, Splunk aggregates all the logs from your entire web farm and presents is as one complete picture. From this I can see trends and machines with difficulties (problematic to spot when you have alot of servers). I am sure Splunk does a lot more, but I am not yet there. When I have discovered them, I will share them but so far I am a happy camper.

Adding SDL Tridion (of course) as a data source
Splunk takes multiple sources of log data and the usual list of candidates are web server (in my case, IIS) logs and Windows Event Logs. I want my Content Delivery logs integrated and so I set about doing this.

For this I will leverage SDL Tridion 2011’s updated logging (LOGBack) and with this I am able to configure logging to output logs to Syslog. Syslog is a standard way of logging application messages that separates the software application and the system logging the messages. In essence, the messages can be pushed out much like a network broadcast and a logging system, Splunk, captures that.
SO I want to configure the logging in SDL Tridion Content Delivery to push the messages to Syslog. For this we need two things: 1) an Appender and 2) a reference to that appender for my log. The Appender configures my log output and looks like:

<appender name="SYSLOG">
     <syslogHost>localhost</syslogHost>
     <facility>LOCAL0</facility>
     <suffixPattern>[%thread] %-5level %logger %msg</suffixPattern>
</appender>

This is the example from the LOGBack help documentation (http://logback.qos.ch/manual/appenders.html) with the addition of the logging level (“%-5level” which captures “ERROR”, “INFO” etc.). Then I can set a given log to push it’s messages to my Syslog appender:

<logger name="com.tridion.deployer">
     <appender-ref ref="rollingDeployerLog"/>
     <appender-ref ref="SYSLOG"/>
</logger>

I’ve kept in the original logging (“rollingDeployerLog”) just for testing and validation.

In Splunk I need to add a data source to listen to this output. So I add a new local Syslog data source specifying the (standard) port. I don’t need to specify a hostname because I did that in my logging configuration on Tridion. I told it to push the messages to “localhost” but that could be any server.

After that, once Tridion logs messages, Splunk will pick them up and store them.

So in November we’ll see the first of these sessions which we hope to repeat over the course of 2011/2012.

So what is the idea? The idea is that anyone can join in and if desired present on a community organized and driven event. The sessions, covering 10-15 minutes, can cover any topic related to a SDL Tridion (e.g. a recently implemented project, bit a useful template). It can be in demonstration or slide format… or both.

Towards the end of October I will post here on the final format of the sessions but we are looking for community volunteers to present the sessions. Do you want to present something? If so, comment on this post and I will get back to towards the end of October.

On Thursday the 2011 MVP weekend started with 11 of the 15 MVPs, or Most Valued Professionals, flying in from across the globe to hotel by the sea near Lisbon (technically, some of the 11 are community builders which are a sort of MVP for SDL employees). If you are not familiar with what an SDL Tridion MVP is then, in short, it is a person who distinguishes themselves by sharing their knowledge over and above what their role demands. They can be anyone from any discipline but they must of course share SDL Tridion knowledge and promote the SDL Tridion community.

Sharing is not an easy thing to do and I, like many of the MVPs, have a busy job. But on the whole the MVPs are contributing to the community and our efforts grow steadily each year as we get more and more familiar of not only what it takes to be an MVP but also what it takes to show it. To quote Tom Jones by Henry Fielding  “Make sure Tom that your actions are not all good, take care that they appear good as well.”  Quoting is very fake elitist sort of thing to do, people do that to sound smart so before any one gets any ideas about me, I watched the BBC adaptation on DVD; the phrase just stuck with me.

Over the week and eventual weekend, the MVPs have been discussing, planning and coding their hearts out from dawn till dusk it what might be describe as a little calmer weekend compared to last year. The coding outcome is the beginning of the rebuilding of the SDL Tridion PowerTools; a hugely popular and useful set of tools to go with any SDL Tridion implementation. The current version does not run on 2011 since 2011 had a graphical interface overhaul allot of the dependencies have since vanished and thus a rebuild is required. More about this in another post but none the less I must mention that the project is looking for volunteers from any part of the community that would like to write a PowerTool or just help with testing.

What little time left of the weekend was spent relaxing on the beach or in Lisbon. The hotel where the MVPs stayed is on the Atlantic coast of Portugal near to Lisbon – or technically nearer to Cascais, a town which looks like a smaller version of Monaco. The hotel, an old fort is shouldered on either side by golden sand beaches with some of the biggest waves I have even seen (ok, I have not really seen _that_ many waves up this close). But something towards 3 meters is enough to knock myself and 10 other MVPs back onto the shore like slightly disgruntled penguins.

The flights we took down to Portugal were with the airline TAP. An airline, much like Alitalia, that has a troubled existence of bankruptcy, sale, cut back etc. Leaving Amsterdam proved to be our first challenge of the weekend with the check-in line taking nearly an hour to check-in a handful of customers. For many, online check-In had not worked. For one of us, it had not worked because the ticket he had did not actually exist. Making the plane via the originally, but ultimately incorrect gate, we boarded with a minute to spare and promptly sat waiting, as waiting turned into a delay of 30 minutes. Why did I run again? I can run, when I need to – and quicker than you would expect – but it is not something I do on a regular basis and needless to say, I took some time to recover. Having made it to Lisbon airport still disgruntled by the rushing in the morning, we were approached by Jose of the local baggage handling firm. The airline, he informed us, had left my bag in Amsterdam because the plane was too heavy. I know I do not pack light but I felt, for a moment, slightly offended until I found out nine other people were in the same boat. Directed off to lost property to fill in the appropriate forms, Jose, who magically reappeared in the lost property office, assure me that the bag would make it on the next flight at 2 PM and would probably, would be at my hotel by 8 PM. In the meantime, fellow MVP, Peter had discovered that his bag was also nowhere to be seen and that, after visiting lost property, it was nowhere to be found. Both bags turned up at around 10 PM that evening, much to our relief.

The flight back, Peter remarked, “would hopefully not be as bad as the way to Lisbon.” Never could words be further from the truth. On Sunday night I slept in a hotel in Costa da Caparica, Almada; an area on the other side of the river from Lisbon. Not many might know this, but Lisbon has alot in common with San Francisco; steep hills, funny little trams, a prison on an island and a Golden Gate Bridge (known as the 25th April Bridge) and it is on one end of this look alike bridge that Almada is situated and it is also where TAP has decided to put its refugee passengers from the evening’s antics.

Firecrews standing by...

Firstly the flight was delayed by 45 minutes and then no sooner as we were bussed out to the plane, we were bussed right back to the terminal where we were “debussed” back into the terminal, only for three minutes later to be “rebussed” and taken back to the plane; the pilot, having changed his mind about whether not we would be allowed to fly with him. After take-off I began to sense that things were not completely good. The sensation of the landing gear going in, then out, then in again did not seem to fit, but then was probably I misinterpreting the various groans, creeks and clunks of the aging Fokker 100 (Jose from lost property told me about these aging aircraft, it seemed he was a plane buff too as well as a bag finding bearer of bad tidings). The second thing that did not seem right was that the steward, when signalled he could get up, got up, but then came back again and sat down. Normally they run into a frenzy of getting coffee ready. As it turned out, the pilot had discovered that the landing gear would not go up correctly (do I fly too much?) and would have to return to the airport; the steward clarified for me that the problem was only that it did not go up, not that it would not go down so I was somewhat relieved.  Standard operating procedure for such a situation is that the stewards hand out a cups of water – something akin to men boiling water when a baby will be born, an act whilst moderately useful is more designed to keep people busy – and the pilot needs to lose fuel and that takes about an hour. After that hour we returned somewhat nervously to the airport. The landing was smooth and with a big sigh of relief the pilot got his customary round of applause from the passengers for saving them from a fiery death.

After we were bussed back to the terminal, we stood in the exit of the arrivals (I got the hint immediately). The staff of TAP then tried to organize the situation. This they did by starting a stock market style trading frenzy of boarding passes and negotiations about bags and changing the flights. With my name, they will rarely say it right and I was tuned into all 15 variations that people use (mostly variations that are other names e.g. Wright). With shock and awe I heard my name correctly pronounced and I squeezed my way through to the hand holding up the ticket. The Portuguese are not that tall on average and surrounded by 50 Dutch, who are average allot taller, the only thing I could see was that hand. After much handing around and waiting to get my own bag I followed a trio of feisty brunet, brown eyed Portuguese TAP ground crew who, on the whole, looked much like each other. One declared in a loud voice normally reserved for large groups of Japanese tourists, that “those going to Amsterdam should follow her”. We continued to follow the three as the “argued” and grumped at each other as to how the whole situation was developing. As I looked and glanced around I was shocked to witness the TAP ground crew equivalent of a “Thach Weave”, an aerobatic manoeuvre where those on the left split right and those on the right split left (leaving the picture of interlocking weave). Which one of these motor mouths was I to follow again? I stuck it out only heading in the same direction hoping that I had chosen correctly. I did and at least for the time being I was on a bus going to a hotel. The hotel was 30 minutes away and I did at points wonder if I was on the right bus going to a hotel or a bus taking up to Amsterdam. I had given up caring and was only looking forward to a hot shower and some sleep.

For the weekend, I would like to thank Nuno Linhares. His dedication and devotion to knowledge sharing over and above what his job already asks (which is over and above what is normal) is amazing. A great host and an awesome guy; just don’t let him borrow your car…

[Update] The flight “drama” made the news.