Yesterday was one of the more frustrating days in recent times. I had to travel for work, a trip that no one understands the purpose of and that I had deemed totally unnecessary. But I agreed to go to "show face". The flight was scheduled around one-ish and so I left the house at 10h15 and made it to the airport for 11.
Got through all the current annoyances of modern day flying, boarded the plane and then came the first announcement that there was a temporary glitch in UK air space due to a problem with their air traffic control systems. The announcements continued periodically explaining the glitch was more than temporary, the routes avoiding the UK were over subscribed and eventually at around four thirty, the captain took the decision to take the plane back to the boarding gates to disembark us. I grabbed something to eat and drink and then we got the update that the flight was cancelled. Eventually got the bags and headed home.
During this whole debacle, I got to thinking about modern times and how we are running into a perfect storm of the intersection of ever more increasingly complex systems and, what appears to me, less of an incentive or the skills to make these systems work. I'm old enough to remember when the people maintaining systems took pride in them and worked hard to reduce errors or issues to as close as zero as possible. Now days, we have a predefined error level and as soon as we are below that, it's knock-off time.
Mark my words, this is not going to end well
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