The thing about budget airlines is that when something goes terribly wrong, one tends to jump to the conclusion that it’s because of the airline and its inherently parsimonious methods, rather than a broader malaise that equally afflicts one’s fellow passengers in the hateful Business Class. Such was the situation when I attempted to fly with Scoot, the budget arm of Singapore Airlines, on the fateful afternoon of Friday the 19th of July.
Five minutes after arriving at Penang Airport and parking in the queue with my family, the sluggish stream of passengers halted. For the first hour I blamed it on the airline. The workers behind the desks seemed to be having an unreasonably good time, and several IT staff climbed over stationary conveyor belts only to shake their heads at the computer, climb back over and vanish from sight. I comforted myself with fantasies in which I had booked with a luxury airline, imagining a lounge and complimentary champagne. Deprived of books with which I could distract myself, I stared at the ceiling and tried not to throttle the teenager next to me, who was scrolling through TikTok and watching each loud video exactly four times before moving onto the next.
My murderous reverie was interrupted when my mother declared, frowning at the Sydney Morning Herald on her mobile, that there was an international Microsoft outage. I must admit some schadenfreude at the knowledge that millions of other people had been affected too: reading that Berlin Airport had cancelled all of their flights made me feel positively grateful for dear old Scoot in comparison. I had never heard of the “blue screen of death,” and considered my own Microsoft laptop solid & reliable. Theoretically, the computers behind the desk showed identical blue screens with a sad face saying that they wouldn’t work; I felt the irrational urge to clamber over the desks to the computers and clobber them until they started functioning.
The SMH’s live updates were just enough to tide me over for the next hour while bloated queues clogged the airport. The Scoot staff, whom I had now decided were saints, scrupulously wrote each passenger’s boarding pass by hand, so that after two and a half hours of stagnant suffering we finally escaped the queue.
Salvation came in the unexpected form of an airport café, where cosy leather chairs and familiarly bland food eased our woes. Reassured by the vast crowds still waiting to check in, we presumed that our flight to Singapore was a distant concern, which would surely be delayed by hours. Alas! It was not to be. When we meandered towards the international terminal, we were rudely shocked by the declaration that our flight was in fact boarding already. To compound our aggrieved wait to get through customs, the green ‘Boarding’ sign slid into the much more ominous ‘FINAL CALL’ sign. The customs staff had hardly returned my passport when I was tearing through the terminal like a cheetah.
Being the sort of person who would call it a ‘bitter blow’ to miss a train, the thought of missing a plane — and for a coffee, at that! — was horror beyond imagination. At the gate scribbled on my boarding pass I arrived like a tornado in Wellington: unexpected, alarming and not in the right location. I was informed by a flight attendant with considerably more composure than I that the gate had been changed, and that the plane would not depart until every passenger had boarded.
From within my haze of panic and adrenaline his words gradually sank in, and I found myself gently escorted to the correct gate, where my flight status was displayed as ‘GATE CLOSED’. A bolt of terror struck my heart, but I was quickly reassured that the sign was automatic, and that the plane I would be departing on had not yet landed at the airport. Deflating like a puncture-riddled tire, I sank with a tremulous sigh into the nearest chair and fixed my gaze on the tarmac to verify myself that the plane was not there. A vast expanse of cement greeted me. Time sank into a delirious fugue, and on the plane to Singapore I dreamed of blue screens and nefarious software updates.
