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I QUOTE from Technology Post. ''Cathay Pacific has inaugurated high-band width fibre links between its. . . computing centres to bolster its disaster recovery infrastructure.'' Where then were these fibre links on CX 2706 from Bangkok last Monday evening? The infrastructure was a disaster and I have not recovered yet. Is it too late for some to be sent to my home? Of course I should not have been in the back end of any plane, least of all one with four digits in its flight number - the aeronautical equivalent of a hurriedly assembled excursion train to the seaside.
By now, the term ''cattle class'' is doing a serious injustice to our socially conscious livestock transporters. The airline industry should be coming up with new concepts in how to carry people who are too poor to fly but insist on doing it anyway. Instead what they have in mind is bigger planes where people with ''Y'' on their boarding cards could be stacked on pallets and their souvenir straw hats and wood carvings could be left to rocket round the compartment at will.
CX 2706 was noteworthy because I was on it and it hurt and because Cathay is an airline which, more than most, persists in the enraging fiction that everything is Xanadu from nose to tail and that service is so good it gives you goose bumps. You do not read much to the contrary because foreign travel writers are given bed length seats and enough beluga till they do goose-bump, and local hacks who know better are so tightly tucked into a marsupial pouch of patronage that, should their mouths poke out at all, they get a strawberry soaked in Krug popped into them.
Ticks in a vulture's armpit had nothing on CX 2706. I obviously had a ticket that had somehow slithered under the Morning Star wire. I was surrounded by them. Only Do-Do Cheng was missing.
We could have done with Do-Do in one of her tougher film roles. All the cabin crew, from stem to stern, were women. I feel you go a politically correct white, but wait. On some North American airlines, this would not matter. Cabin crew sex there was decided at birth by a toss of the registrar's coin. The delicate Asian female, on the other hand, is not conditioned to confront the male passenger attempting to empty his overhead locker on touchdown with ''Shaddap and siddown, jerk.'' Cathay's girls looked tense. There was as much chance of a smile as the dry martini promised on the drinks card. As the female passengers scratched each others eyes out over seat numbers and males roamed the aisles looking for spots to sell jeans and T-shirts, the girls started to regroup and retreat. Control was visibly handed over to the tour group leaders. A solitary chap with a taste for gin and tonic hadn't a prayer.
And then the tour guides really got theirs. In return for having encouraged, probably on commission, their charges to eat chilli clams by the bucket in Thai restaurants all weekend, the group members began to up-chuck, to park amongst the furniture, every meal they had eaten since Thursday. A crowd gathered worthy of a traffic accident. Two women fainted and were carried away limp. Rows 62-74 were a vomitarium.
Against this, more customary service features took on a surreal tint. Above the din, I was reading on the menu card how Cathay's food is supposed to encompass all the elements of the Chinese universe. The pork slices must have been the ''metal'' and the baby corns the ''wood.'' Making a rare foray from the pantry, a stewardess rushed towards me, looked straight over my head and thrust her hand down the side of my leg. What seemed like silent, in-flight vasectomy was actually an off-target attempt to put out my neighbour's service call light switched on by accident 40 minutes before.
We were told to sit up straight for landing. We couldn't. Our seats were broken. So was the catch on the table in front of the little girl opposite. The sellotape holding it had given up under pressure from the crowding vomit watchers. The girl's mother was instructed to hold the table up during landing. Did this reflect CITIC's growing investment share in Cathay Pacific? Way up front and curiously detached from his payload, Captain Higginbotham explained that we would not go direct to a gate but would have to be bussed from the plane. He decided this was a cue for a homily. ''In these days of increasing congestion in Hongkong, you cannot always guarantee. . .'' he began and went on, quite untranslated, as tables and chairs rattled, women swooned and sick bags flew.
I think his fibre links had snapped.
