First Flight

7th 2006 August marked the beginning of my professional life.
I was out of my house with a truck-load of degrees and now a "working" software professional. Thankfully I am still working.
Even though the first job was nowhere near what I had expected it to be, a job is a job after all. I was rather unsure about it from the beginning but was in because my father had insisted that I take it up. And if I were to "connect the dots" now, 3 years hence, I think being at Skyscape was one of the best things that happened to me.

Traveling by train was, and continues to be, super boring for me.
But I choose to endure the boredom rather than the guilt that would become a part of my life had I spent my dad's hard earned money on air tickets.
Coimbatore is 32 hours by rail, and a mere 1.5 hours by air, from Mumbai.
Now, since I was working and financially independent (well almost) and had the "power", however little, I vowed that I would always fly home. And more so, because I had flown only once before and that was before I could walk or talk.
On completing 3 months with the organization, along with the confirmation letter I received a "joining bonus". This bonus added to my "power" and just enabled me to get the cheapest air tickets I could find.

Even though booking air tickets is not inherently a complex process, I involved many of my colleagues in it. There was a lot of advice given on ticket prices on various web sites, agents who could get tickets at a lower cost, hackers who continually monitor the websites and who have brought tickets for as low as Rs.60, the time of the flight and its influence on ticket fares, fraudulent websites, etc etc.
The funny thing is none of them ever mentioned anything about the integrity of the airline even once. Am unaware of its reputation now, but back then Air Deccan meant cancelled/delayed flights, third rate service and virtually no guarantee that a having a ticket meant a ride in the sky.

Once the tickets were booked I made even more friends in the office.
Anyone and everyone who heard that I had an Air Deccan booking would come up to me
and narrate the terrible experiences they or their friend, or friends of their friends had had with the airline. One of them even advised me to have a back up railways booking, just in case. Thanks sir, your advice is greatly appreciated!!

I was set to fly on a Saturday morning at 7.20 am. Since I lived far from the airport and did not want to spend even more money on a early morning taxi, I decided to spend Friday night at my aunts place which is very close to the airport. After a light dinner I retired to bed at 11.00pm that night praying that nothing goes wrong with the flight plan. At 1.00am I was woken up by the beep of an incoming SMS.
I was wide awake instantly and knew something was wrong.
The message, after the headers and all, read something like "This is to inform you that your flight XXX from Mumbai to Coimbatore departing at XXX' some text missing....".
And so it dawned upon me, first hand, how Air Deccan got its reputation.
The missing part of the message arrived a few minutes later and said that " has been preponed by one hour."
Yeah! God is indeed great.
Soon after the message, there was a call from the airlines representative also informing me of the change in
departure timings. Neat.

I checked in at 5.20 am on Saturday morning and soon there was an announcement or something like that which told me that the flight had been delayed by an hour due to technical difficulties. Perhaps I had spoken too soon about God being great.
After waiting for 2 hours, I thought we were finally ready.
All of us boarded the flight and I was surprised to see that the interior of the "Airplane" looked like that of a "Asiad" bus. Just one big block of seats packed together. I was expecting to board the flight with a lot important looking executives, geeks who could not take their hands of a laptop, a picnic group with lots of beautiful girls, some cute couples and a flirt who on trying to get fresh
with the stewardess gets kicked off the before take-off.
Perhaps I could also throw in a son taking his aging father on a trip. (I watch a lot of movies.)

That whole image was blown to smithereens when I saw that there was a mad rush to occupy the best seats in the plane.
Families were literally rushing in their younger members with handbags and handkerchiefs, so that seats could be booked. What the *&^%!! These kind of scenes were common on State Transport buses, but I had never imagined it on anything else but a "lal dabba". Once all were seated and ready and the pilot appeared and announced that there will be a further delay because the another technical problem has cropped up. A failed unit test case I thought. I just hoped the airplane unit testing is not carried out the way I do it. If some code fails some test, I just delete the test from the test suite. And then magically all code passes all the tests.

If the mad rush for a good seat was not enough, soon after taking off, the air hostess appeared carting along a trolley full of eatables and water.
For a moment I thought she is going to start hocking Chinese pens with a torch or a "disco mala"!!

I was soon asleep and was woken up when the pilot was describing Ooty to our right and instructing us to put on the seat belts.