Well that was an interesting day. As you will have read, a lightning strike caused some problems and that coupled with planes flying round the storms led to delays that compounded over the course of the day meaning that lots of our final flights landing 90 minutes or so later than usual. We had 22 landing after midnight and there's no way the skeleton night shift would have coped.
So 6 of us stayed on - 2 teams of 3. First one for us was a nice light one from Edinburgh. All going swimmingly until we went to put the bags on the domestic reclaim belt in the North terminal - one of our other teams were there and they had somehow managed to block the belt, which shut itself down. They had another flight to meet so I told them to go and do that and I would sort the belt out and then unload our bags. The other 2 in my team went off to meet our next flight.
20 minutes later and with the help of engineers, we managed to get the belt going again and I unloaded my lorry. Then off to the next job.
From feckin Oporto. Front hold CRAMMED with feckin bicycles in big plastic cases. Rear hold CRAMMED with feckin surfboards. Middle holds CRAMMED with suitcases, wheelchairs and baby buggies. Bastards!
Next job Air Fungus with 3 containers full of feckin transfer bags and cargo (mainly mail). Next job a fairly straighforward Faro flight, with only a few sets of golf clubs (they're usually rammed). Last job Heraklion - we put 2 teams on it for speed.
Then back to the crew room for 10 minutes before being sent out to go round the airport picking up all the electric tugs that had been left lying around (some of the lazy sods I work with just leave them all over the shop, even though they should bring them back and put them on charge for the morning) but happily for me, I was the one driving the minibus, just dropping colleagues off to drive the tugs back.
Then, just as the daylight creeps across the sky, we go home.
Yet again, I nearly run over a fox in Coulsdon. It's like they play "chicken" with cars - darting out at the last minute. Next time...
Couple of cans then bed.
And do it all again in 10 hours time.
