May, 1996:
Why would anyone fly from Los Angeles to Atlanta via Dallas? To stop by the Radio Advertising Bureau for a brief meeting with Mike Mahone before continuing to Atlanta, where the next morning Brian Phillips had arranged for me to spend the day with the airstaff of 99X.
This was a return visit for me, so rather than do a formal seminar I shared a bunch of new tapes with them, gave feedback on each of their own airchecks, and facilitated a station brainstorming meeting that produced some pretty nifty ideas. (My favorite was a sales promotion using “Virtual Reality Rides.”)
Later in the month I left for Leipzig, Germany, where I was a guest speaker at the annual Leipziger Radio Show. (This was my third consecutive year as a guest speaker.)
My flight schedule routed me from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., then to Frankfurt and then on to Leipzig.
I really dislike Washington’s Dulles (now Reagan) International Airport. One reason is that I often find myself having to ride on their dumb “mobile lounges” to get from one gate to another. (A “mobile lounge” is their word for…a bus.)
There are other reasons, having to do with the unnaturally large population of politicians nearby. But I really don’t enjoy that airport.
Surprisingly, my plane from L.A. reached Dulles ahead of schedule. At least, it would have been ahead of schedule if Air Traffic Control had not told us to circle for a while, due to bad weather (thunderstorms).
We were supposed to arrive at 3:56PM.
At 3:40 we were told to circle until 4:15.
Okay, no problem. My flight to Frankfurt didn’t leave until 5:25. Even if we circled until 4:30, I shouldn’t have a problem making the connection.
At 4:30 the pilot announced that we had been diverted to Richmond, Virginia.
We landed in Richmond, refueled…and waited. After 90 minutes on the ground, we returned to Dulles.
The crew assured everyone that all flights in and out of Dulles were affected by the storm, and it was unlikely that our connecting flights would have been able to leave. As soon as we got off the plane, they kept assuring us, a United customer service representative would be waiting for us to answer any questions we would have.
We landed at Dulles. There was no customer service representative in sight. (Big surprise.)
After spending an hour in line with other frustrated passengers, I managed to get booked on a Lufthansa flight to London (from where I then would connect to Leipzig). My suitcase would be removed from the plane from L.A. and checked through to Leipzig via London. I would, however, have to retrieve my bag in London to take it through Customs before checking it back to Leipzig.
I took a sleeping pill and slept through the transatlantic flight. Upon arriving in London, I asked a Lufthansa Customer Service representative where I should retrieve my suitcase. She looked at my ticket and said, “You don’t have to. It is being sent Leipzig.”
“Are you sure?” I inquired.
“Yes, I am. Here, I can prove it easily enough.”
She walked over to a computer terminal, hit a few keys, and frowned.
She could find no record of my luggage.
Fifteen minutes and several phone calls later (with my flight almost ready to leave for Leipzig), she located my computer file.
“Just like I said,” she smirked. “It’s already on your plane for Leipzig.”
I thanked her and rushed to the gate (in another terminal, naturally) from which that flight was leaving.
Lufthansa hadn’t told me this, but the flight made one stop, in Dusseldorf, before continuing to Leipzig.
During the first leg of the trip, I took a number of magazines and trade publications out of my briefcase to read while aloft. When we reached Dusseldorf, those of us who were continuing to Leipzig were asked to stay on the plane during the 30-minute layover.
“Those of us” consisted of me and just a few others.
Obviously, no one ever thinks of flying from London to Leipzig via Dusseldorf.
I used much of those 30 minutes trying to reach the hotel in Leipzig, where I had been expected hours earlier. I was hoping to get word to whoever was picking me that I would be on a different flight. (One of the airline people offered me the use of his cellular phone — which in 1996 still was a rarity, especially for an American.)
Unfortunately, neither of the telephone numbers I had for the hotel worked (although I did have an interesting conversation with some poor guy whose house I’d apparently called; he didn’t speak English and I don’t speak German) and no one answered at the Protocol Office in Leipzig. (They were in charge of the details, but it was, after all, Sunday.)
So I returned to my seat…
…to discover that the cleaning crew had removed my trade publications which I had so carefully placed in the seat pocket in front of me.
So please don’t ask me what happened in those two issues of RADIO INK, the latest copy the LAMG (Los Angeles Macintosh Group) DIGEST, and whatever other publications disappeared.
Not that I didn’t try to retrieve them. I got up from my seat and returned to the front of the plane, which had not yet been boarded by the passengers who were beginning their trip in Dusseldorf. I asked the on-board staff and was told the cleaning crew was gone…along with my reading material.
As I walked back to my seat, I passed by some big, burly guy who had been loudly joking around with a couple of the crew members. He smiled broadly at me and said, “Let me see your passport.”
A more naive traveler might well have complied, but I was much too sophisticated to fall for that. I could tell he was making some kind of a joke, but I didn’t want to play along to the point of handing my passport over to some stranger.
“No,” I smiled.
“Let me see your passport!” he repeated, laughing.
“No!” I laughed.
“What do you mean, ‘no’? Give me your passport!”
Tiring of this, I decided to end the encounter by playing his own game. In a firm voice (but still smiling) I said, “Give me five dollars!”
The sneaky logic behind my demand was that if he were reluctant to give five dollars to a stranger, why should that stranger be willing to give him his passport?
Just a minor diversion to help pass the time before we left for Leipzig.
He extended an index finger and poked it much harder than one would have thought possible…into my chest.
“You want me to arrest you?” He no longer was smiling. He was angry.
Wait a moment. We were just joking around. Was this guy some kind of nut?
Witnessing the commotion, a Lufthansa crew member stepped over to us and asked what the problem was.
“We’ve got a real funny man here,” the finger-poking stranger snarled.
“Who is this guy?” I asked the crew member.
Herr Finger-Poker beat the guy to the answer: “I am the police! And I asked you for your passport!”
Me to crew member: “He’s the police?”
The crew member nodded yes.
Me to Herr Finger-Poker: “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?”
“You can see that by my uniform!”
He wasn’t wearing a uniform. He was wearing a leather jacket. He turned to reveal a police patch high up on the outside of one shoulder.
Oops.
Now, this next part is a bit hard to explain. In my seminars, I talk about establishing rapport with listeners. I explain that “rapport” is an enhanced state of communication and that one way to achieve it is to match the other person’s tone of voice, volume, energy, etc.
(It is entirely possible to be “in rapport” with someone with whom you are violently disagreeing.)
I was in rapport with this policeman. Communicating badly, but in rapport. Now my choice was:
A) Lower my voice, avert my eyes, apologize profusely and beg him not to arrest me.
B) Maintain the rapport by continuing to approximate his tone of voice.
Believe it or not, I thought Choice B would be more effective.
That is not as stupid as it sounds. My goal was to maintain rapport while verbally backpedalling.
So, proffering my passport, I said in a voice slightly more subdued than his, “But I couldn’t see behind you! If you had just told me who you are, I would have given you my passport immediately!”
Angrily, he examined the little blue book. I passed those moments wondering about the comfort & cuisine of German jails.
“A very Funny Man,” he muttered. (Trust me; he did capitalize “Funny Man” as he spoke.)
My own voice dropped, too: “Look, I had no idea you’re a police officer. I apologize if I offended you; I thought you were just some guy playing a joke!”
He handed my passport back to me and walked away. It appeared I was out of danger, but now I really started to feel bad because I could see he was genuinely angry with me. I don’t believe I caused the incident, but clearly to him it was a case of a wise-guy tourist treating a policeman so disrespectfully.
Glancing at one of the crew members and nodding toward me he said, bitterly, “He is a very Funny Man.”
He got off the plane. The other passengers boarded. And we left for Leipzig.
Sure, my initial flight had been diverted to another city and then arrived a few hours late. And I had to stand in line for an hour to find a replacement flight. And my precious magazines were thrown away before I could read them. And I almost got arrested.
But soon I would be in Leipzig, and all would be well.
Or so I thought.
Actually, the really stressful part of my trip was still ahead of me.
