Andrew Cotton

Thursday 7 April 2011

A grand don't come for free

Moved out the multimillion dollar beach house I briefly lived in while in Devon the last few weeks, did some plumbing, had to deal with the most horrible and useless estate agent in the world who I nicked named the devil woman and finally found a place to live, had a few loose nights out and did a bit of surfing then picked up a few new boards, got myself a wetsuit sponsor who I’m stoked to be with and booked myself a ticket to indo. Now I’ve just saved myself a thousand pounds, yep 1 grand. The dreaded check in desk is possibly every surfers nightmare with a lottery outcome but when I got told I’d have to pay a 15kg excess for my sporting equipment I wasn’t that bothered, it’s pretty usual and usually can cost anything from £20.00 to £200.00 but when the woman at the information desk asked for £1000.00, then my credit card I pretty much started crying. ‘Sorry sir but the only sporting equipment we let go for free is golf clubs’ ‘we give you 20kg of luggage for free, sporting equipment or not and anything over that is classed as excess and charged accordingly’ ‘can’t we come to some agreement’ was what I pleaded ‘you know just pretend there golf clubs or something’ but she coldly told me rules were rules and there was no one in the airport who could authorise this. I just left the counter speechless and feeling sick. Without much thought I started unpacking and stuffing anything I thought was essential into my board bag, I’d have to ditch my bag and just take boards, I went back to the counter and explained what I wanted to do and asked where I could leave a bag. She didn’t give a shit pointed me to the check in counter again and said I had to re weigh the bags I wanted to check in. As I wrestled my bag onto the scales and poured my heart out to the guy whilst trying to take some weight with my foot, the check in phone rang. It was that bitch from the information desk telling the guy he had to take my boards to an oversized weighing belt, what was her fecking problem I thought as the scales dipped between 19-23kg depending on where my foot was.  The boards weighed in at just over 27kg and although I was still in the depths of a serious excess luggage fisting I had saved myself some serious money, then the guy just turned to me and quietly said ‘we’ll just call that 20kg or there about shall we?!’ and gave me my boarding card.
OK so I still have a bag in Heathrow and no clothes but yet again it shows how fickle the rules of the excess baggage are, just hope they turn up now.

3 comments:

  1. Hey bud, great result, which airline did you fly with ? Just for the record.

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  2. Yeah I would be interested to know too,, was it Malaysian?

    If we all kicked off about the fickle behaviour of check in staff they would just clamp down on the nice ones and fuck us all over, cunts!

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  3. malaysia are fine with boards, well they were last month unless they weigh over 25kg (BSD)

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