In Reply to: Speaking from experience, Cliff? EOM posted by Mad Batak on Friday, 7. October 2005 at 17:57 Bali Time:
Last time I was flying home from Bali I got chatting to a bloke in the little smoking room at the airport, and he was whingeing coz he'd been stuck in Bali for three weeks, just waiting around with nothing to do... while getting paid for working.
Apparently, his job was to oversee the assembling of some kind of special crane at the docks, and it turned out the crane they assembled was a couple of inches too short to do the job it had to do, so this poor bugger had to just hang around in Bali waiting for another crane to be shipped from Darwin.
So he got paid, didn't have to work, and whinged about it. I asked if he went here or saw that... nope. Just hung around the hotel, bored out of his skull.
And just when I thought there was no way he was going to make it on the plane alive, the call came to board, and I let him escape. And then a few minutes later, I found I was sitting next to him all the way home.
Dear Lord, thank you for free alcohol on the plane...