Curmie vs. The Man

The primary reason Curmie has been relatively quiet online of late is that he and Beloved Spouse took a much-deserved (by her, at least) vacation trip to Ireland.  There’s another reason, too, but we’ll get to that in a moment.  It was our first visit to that country together without a bevy of undergraduates in tow, which meant we could do things we couldn’t before, and could skip things we’d seen before and didn’t need to see again.

All in all, it was a wonderful week.  We saw some magnificent shows, took a bus tour we’d wanted to take for years but couldn’t because of course responsibilities, had lunch with a dear friend, ate at both our favorite Galway restaurants, and had absolutely fabulous weather the entire trip.

There were some less fun moments, of course; with the exception of Curmie’s first-ever case of sunburn rash, they pretty much all fell under the category of corporate incompetence (or deception), most of it technology-related. 

We begin at the beginning.  We live over a two-hour drive from the Houston airport, and our flight to Chicago to connect to Shannon was reasonably early Sunday morning, so we decided to do what we’d done several times when taking students on their Study Abroad trips: we headed to Houston Saturday afternoon and stayed at the Sleep Inn near the airport.  If you spend the night, you can park there for free for the length of your trip (or at least for a set number of days), making the difference between spending the night and paying for airport parking pretty reasonable.  And they run a free shuttle to and from the airport. 

Except.  We showed up, told them we had a reservation, even showed the guy at the desk a print-out which showed we not only had a reservation but had paid a deposit… but we weren’t in their system.  It took over a half hour and a phone call to the manager to finally get into our room.  (The fact that the room was musty and they couldn’t be bothered to answer the phone to get a shuttle back from the airport wasn’t corporate’s fault.)

Anyway, we were finally able to dump our stuff in the room and go get something to eat.  On our return, we decided to check in for our morning flight.  We hadn’t flown internationally since COVID, so we figured that anything to reduce the time at the airport was probably a good idea.  It took Curmie a couple of minutes, but he got his boarding passes without a lot of trouble.  Beloved Spouse was not so lucky.  She’d been going back and forth with United for some time: she was good to go, then they needed “travel documents,” which of course they already had, then she was good again…

That process continued Saturday evening.  Then, after several tries, Beloved Spouse thought she’d finally checked in.  But they’d sent her Curmie’s boarding passes, not her own!  So, the attempt to get a good night’s sleep before the flight ended up doing the opposite, as we were on edge, wondering if we’d even be able to go.  This may have been an irrational fear, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

The next morning, we got up earlier than we’d wanted to so we could get to the airport and see what we could do.  We were able to get on an earlier shuttle.  The woman we talked to at the terminal may have been a little abrupt, but she guided us through the process.  Beloved Spouse had her boarding pass, and we were through security before our shuttle ride was originally scheduled.  So, we were in good shape… until…

Beloved Spouse, knowing that Curmie is both claustrophobic and reasonably long-legged, had splurged when she bought the tickets and paid extra to get bulkhead seats for the Chicago to Shannon portion of the trip.  Guess what plane didn’t have bulkhead seats?

Anyway, we arrived in Shannon on time, so now it was a matter of waiting for the Expressway bus to take us to Galway.  We saw a bus arrive, and it showed that it was the number 51 bus: the route that would take us to Galway.  We loaded our stuff into the luggage compartment and went to get on the bus.  The driver said that no, this was the bus to Cork, not Galway.  Both are the #51 bus.  Of course, they are!  Welcome to Ireland.  We dragged our bags out and waited for the actual Galway bus, which showed up only a few minutes later.

We had at least been wise enough to partake of the toilet facilities in the airport, as neither of us would claim our bladders as the strongest part of our bodies.  Yes, the website said there was a toilet on the bus… and there was.  It was locked, however, and judging by the expressions on the face of the young woman who apparently asked the driver about it and his response, it was going to stay that way throughout the journey (roughly two hours to Galway, although I think she got off at an earlier stop).  Hey, it wasn’t false advertising.  There was a toilet on the bus; they didn’t say anything about it being usable.

Skip ahead to Wednesday morning.  Beloved Spouse had booked us on a Citilink bus to Dublin for a quick visit with the aforementioned dear friend, a former student who now lives and works there.  We were to leave at 8:45, but the reservation came back as 8:15.  We knew generally where the coach station was, but we weren’t exactly sure, and the QR codes e-mailed to Beloved Spouse wouldn’t work as screenshots.  We found a guy who looked rather like the Scott’s turfbuilder dude; he was very helpful, and we ended up on the 8:45 we wanted to begin with.

By this time, Optimum, Beloved Spouse’s e-mail provider, had “temporarily” suspended access to her account for “suspicious activity” or some such; Curmie can’t remember the exact phrasing.  Beloved Spouse spent the majority of the 2 ½ hour trip to Dublin dealing with Optimum, trying to get her e-mail back.  (To be fair, it would have been the middle of the night in the US, so maybe they weren’t staffed as well, quantitatively or qualitatively, as they would have been at a different time.)  One of the reps said that no, there wasn’t any suspicious activity, and he’d fix it.  He didn’t.

Two different reps declared the problem solved.  It wasn’t, and indeed it wasn’t until we were back in the US that e-mail was restored.

So, now we’re in Dublin, and we’re going to take the train back to Galway.  We have specific seat assignments: Coach C, seats 61 and 62.  (Don’t quote me on the numbers.)   But the coaches aren’t marked, and there are no seats with those numbers in the most logical choice for Coach C.  Or in the second-best choice, either.  We ended up just grabbing a couple of empty seats.  Other than being in rather too close proximity to an obnoxious frat boy (the usual apologies for redundancy) who seemed to make it his mission to embody every unflattering stereotype of Americans abroad, we had a good trip and made it back to Galway in plenty of time to make our dinner reservation at our favorite restaurant.

We did notice that morning that although our confirmation for the bus ride back to Shannon Airport said it left from the Galway Coach Station, there was no Expressway presence there.  Curmie asked at the information desk.  The guy there was the only rude person we met in Ireland.  He disdainfully declared that “they have their own station at the top of the hill.”  They do not, of course, but we finally figured out that since we already had our tickets, we could just show up where our bus into Galway had unloaded.  No harm done, except a little unwanted exercise.

We adopted the same strategy for the flight home as we’d used heading east.  Our flight to Chicago was pretty early Sunday morning, so we headed to Shannon airport on the #51 bus (!), arriving about 7:00 Saturday evening.  Our hotel in Galway had stored our bags when we arrived there a few hours before check-in time, but for some reason they wouldn’t do that after we’d checked out.  Curmie had never heard of a hotel doing that, but we saw a similar sign in a different hotel, so maybe that’s standard procedure now.  So we schlepped our bags across Eyre Square to a “left luggage” place, and for 19 Euro we were unencumbered until a few minutes before our bus left.

We’d stayed at the Park Inn in Shannon once before, and it’s literally a couple hundred yards across a parking lot to the airport.  It purports to be a 3-star hotel, and is now a Radisson property (Curmie can’t remember if that was true when we stayed there in 2010 or thereabouts).

So.  3-star hotel.  No elevator/lift to our room on the third floor.  (They did have someone carry our bags up.)  No air conditioning.  It wasn’t hot out, but it was sunny, and the drapes were open, meaning we were effectively in a greenhouse; the fan helped, but was insufficient.  Nowhere near enough space in the restaurant, which virtually everyone in the hotel would want to use.  <Sigh.>

Anyway, the trip home was uneventful.  Indeed, the check-in, security clearance, and US customs/immigration processes were as smooth as Curmie has ever experienced.  With the exception of a lousy cabin crew on the Chicago to Houston leg, it was great.  (And we did get exit row seats Shannon to Chicago.)

We got home about 9:00 CDT (3:00 a.m. Ireland time) Sunday night.  All was well until Curmie’s laptop wouldn’t turn on Monday morning.  No telling what happened, and Curmie makes no accusations.  But there are enough things that he wants to do on the laptop every day that getting a replacement as soon as possible was definitely called for.  (It is indeed sad how reliant we have become on our devices.)

We’d bought the old laptop through Walmart, so we cranked up Beloved Spouse’s desktop and went to their website.  According to the site, basically every laptop they sold could be delivered in less than 20 minutes if we paid an extra $10, or sometime that day for free.  We ordered one, deciding that same-day delivery was sufficient.  Shortly thereafter, we got a notice that our laptop would be delivered a week later (!).  We could cancel the order, so we did, and actually got a better deal from Amazon, who’d deliver on Tuesday.  (They did.)  When Amazon are the good guys in a scenario, it’s not a good thing.

Approximately ten hours after we cancelled the Walmart order, they shipped the damned thing, anyway.  It arrived yesterday (Thursday).  Now we’ve got to figure out how to return something that any competent company wouldn’t have shipped.  Arrrggghh.

Oh, and when Curmie was setting up the new computer, he got a message that started “Since you bought your laptop in Nigeria…”  Way to go, Lenovo.