I’d done the automatic check-in thing for passengers with only carry-on luggage, or tried to. I can’t remember now exactly what it was - I had to hand them a piece of paper, or something else really simple before I could move on; the reason I can’t remember exactly hat it was is because the staffmember’s reaction was so weird it overpowers everything else. She started to deal with, then got a far-away look in her eyes, stared silently at some point in the distance for a while as I tried to talk to her, then crabwalked sideways to a group of chattering employees. It was really weird.
The queue got really long while the staff chattered amongst themselves (it was definitely the right place to check in) and whenever anyone tried to approach them or ask a question they’d make that rudely dismissive ‘brushing away’ motion with their hands and refuse to talk to the customers at all.
It was a huge queue of people asking each other why the staff were ignoring them. If there was a problem, fine, have someone say ‘sorry, there’s a problem - we’ll be with you as soon as we can’ then that would have made some sort of sense. But they didn’t even look at the queuing passengers, just at each other, with very angry expressions.
After check-in was finally completed all seemed normal till we’d got to the point where our plane should be leaving with us on it. It wasn’t. It simply disappeared from all the departure boards.
They had nobody at all to ask for queries for the first two hours, and then one harried man who wandered by and was accosted by everyone but couldn’t find out anything because the phones, he said, weren’t working. He then left. I verified that the phones weren’t working by going behind the desk and trying them myself - some other passengers did too. All of us sitting at the desk as if we were staff.
Shortly after that, someone else wandered by and wondered why we were still waiting, as the plane had been ready to go for two hours. He then wandered off through the staff exit doors again ignoring people’s questions.
Earlier that night I’d been in and out of those doors a few times looking for food and information - the customer doors were a long way away - till someone (pulling a hoover) noticed non-staff using the doors and came to shut them properly.
At one point there hadn’t been any staff for so long that some other passengers tried to attract the attention of somebody, anybody, by standing at the glass windows and miming ‘help!’ and holding their tickets up.
When it came to boarding it was just one man out of uniform who walked up past the people sleeping on the floor, opened the door, went to the desk and sat down. I asked if we were boarding soon. He said of course we were (or something similar) and made that brushing-off gesture that made think he probably was actually staff, so my daughter and I and another man gathered up our stuff and went through the door, gradually followed by everyone else. No member of staff actually stood at the door; no checking of boarding passes or anything.
When we did get on the plane there were still used cups and food trays on most of the seats. My seat was piled with blankets. The crewmember who gave us the food said he hadn’t been supposed to be on the flight at all and had just flown in from London himself - that makes for a really long work day. Some of the crew were still getting into their uniforms. We weren’t greeted at the door and told which way to go, like usual, but we all just kinda bundled on haphazardly.
There was other really bizarre and rude stuff I’m forgetting now; I’ve never been on a flight like it.
Apologies for the rant. It was pretty horrible and in hindsight some of it was pretty dangerous.