It’s been a while since I posted again hasn’t it! All with good reason of course, I’ve had back to back business trips to Japan, Korea and the US (as well as a 4 day holiday in Chicago tagged on the back of the last business trip).
I got back to Shanghai from Chicago on Thursday evening looking forward to a nice long weekend to get over the jetlag before going back to work, only for my hopes to be immediately dashed away when I got an email on Friday morning asking what time I wanted picking up for work on Saturday morning.. Ahhhh… stupid Chinese holiday system, I’d totally forgotten about working the weekend.. So I was back in the office yesterday, but I’m taking a holiday today, I just can’t face a 7 day working week..
Anyway, where do I start with the US trip, well, how about the beginning and the complete mess I made of actually getting into the US…
I was travelling out from Shanghai on Sunday afternoon to arrive in Minneapolis (via Chicago) late on Sunday evening. My meeting was starting on Monday morning and I was presenting at 10am, which wasn’t giving me a lot of time to get used to being in a different continent but I figured that if I took some melatonin on the flight to get some sleep coupled with a fistful of ginseng with my coffee on the Monday morning I should get along just fine.
I spent most of Sunday slowly packing for the trip, said my goodbyes to H and jumped in a taxi to the airport at around 1pm. There was already a big queue when I arrived at terminal 2 and I must have waited for near on 30 minutes before finally being able to check in.
I placed my bag on the scales, passed my passport and e-ticket to the guy behind the counter and asked for an aisle seat. He started entering my info on the computer and asked if I’d completed my travel authorization.
“My what?”
“yes, your ESTA, your pre-authorisation to travel”
I rolled my eyes and pointed to my passport, “I’m British, I don’t need to do anything like that”, to which he passed back all my documents and replied, “you can’t travel if you did not complete this application, even if you are British”. “He’s so wrong” I thought, “he’s going to feel like such an idiot when he realises”, but no, he wasn’t moving on it, and now here comes the supervisor backing him up and handing me back my luggage..
“Don’t worry” he said, “it’s a 10 minute online application”, he pointed down the aisle, “walk down here and you’ll find a business centre, you can use a computer there, complete the registration and then come back”, he wrote down a web address for me on a piece of paper (https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/
The business centre was at the far end of terminal 2. It was tatty but pretty reasonable, they charged something like 10rmb for access and use of their LAN. I paid up, sat at an empty desk and booted up my laptop, setting out my documents while I was waiting so that I could be as quick as possible. I entered the web address, clicked enter, and the screen began to load. It immediately looked a bit odd, there was a logo at the top and then a short paragraph of text underneath, much more simple than I’d imagined. I read the text “this website will be down for routine maintenance on Sunday 25th September between the hours of 1am and 3:30 am EDT”. Shit.. I reloaded to make sure, once, twice, five times, it was down.
I searched the web for the EDT time zone praying that we were almost out of the shutdown, but no, EDT is basically 12 hours behind Shanghai, the site wasn’t due to come back up until 3:30pm Shanghai time, 10 minutes after check-in closed.. I searched for a back-up system or an alternative website for the application.. nothing… I browsed back to it and pressed reload, and again… still down…
No point in panicking I thought, just need to wait and see if it comes back online early, if not I’ll have to change my flight to tomorrow and miss the first (and most important) day of the meeting. I glanced around the room at the others, the guy next to me was staring at his computer and as my eyes drifted to his screen I was surprised to see that he was logged into the same ESTA front page that I was on, as I watched he clicked the mouse button reloading the page. I looked over my shoulder, there were another two guys using computers , they were also on exactly the same page, sitting, waiting, pressing reload..
I was relieved to find I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know about this and said so to the guy next to me, he was French. One of the guys behind me claimed to have found an alternative website for the application, I took a quick look and he was obviously wrong, it was some kind of visa-assistance website, “KWIKVISAS” or some nonsense, basically you fill in the form on their website rather than the ESTA website and then their guy enters your info into the ESTA website for you and sends you back the certificate. I told him what I thought of the website, he wasn’t having it, he submitted the form and paid a hefty bill for the service (something like 50USD, the ESTA costs 14USD) before the screen came up with a predictable “our agents will send you your ESTA certificate within the next 48 hours”, I felt smug, someone was even more foolish than me!!
Time was getting on now, it had just gone 3 o’clock, it was now or never, but I’d had an idea…. If there was maintenance going on then presumably there was a guy working on the website on the other end and he might be able to see that people are trying to connect to the website. Maybe if I just keep pressing reload over and over again he’ll realise how urgently I need to make the application and he’ll put it back online again a bit early for me (ok so I’d possibly gone a little insane at this point). So I upped my reload rate from around once a minute to around once every 5 seconds for the next 15 minutes, I even called H and asked her to do the same to double my chances.
Predictably enough 3:20 came and went, the site was still down. I shut down my computer and walked over to ticketing to change my ticket to the next day. Luckily there was availability on the flight so I could change without problem. The girl asked for my credit card, “errr why do you need my credit card??”, “for the extra cost for the ticket”, “what extra cost, I’m just changing the day??”. She went on to explain some ridiculously complicated system which I can summarise as follows: I’d booked my ticket well in advance and got a discount, to change my ticket to tomorrow I basically had to refund my old ticket and buy a new one, buying a ticket at such short notice has no discount, I have to pay full price. I tried to argue but she wasn’t moving, I had a choice, either pay up or no flight tomorrow. Defeated, I handed over my credit card, she handed back a stub for signing, the extra charge came to 3500 RMB… I nearly cried… Just as I was finishing up my phone rang, it was H, “THE WEBSITE IS BACK ONLINE!!!” I glanced at my watch, it was about 3:35, I looked down towards the check-in counters, they were deserted, the staff had already closed down and left, “I’ll see you in an hour” I said and made my way to the taxi line.
Just when the story couldn’t get any worse I eventually got into my hotel at Minneapolis late on Monday evening (10:30 or so) after getting the form sorted and flying from Shanghai on Monday afternoon. I emailled a couple of the guys as I arrived to see where they were, I knew they’d been off to watch the baseball that evening and was surprised that nobody was in the bar. I went up to my room and started unpacking, by 11:30 nobody had replied so I took some melatonin and went to bed.
The next morning I met Phil, one of the guys I’d emailled, “where were you last night” he said, “I never heard back from you” I replied, “I texted you” he said, ah.. I’d never given him my new number.. “We had an awesome night” he said, “we left the baseball and popped into this bar round the corner from the hotel, OMD were playing there” (OMD – Orchestral Manouvers in the Dark), “yeah right…you’re winding me up..“, “no really” he said, and sure enough he pulled out his phone and showed me a video of him and the others watching OMD playing “Enola Gay” in the bar the previous night. Damn… OMD used to be one of my favourites from the 80s and I’d missed out big time.
Then to top it all off he showed me some more pictures, “yeah, when we finished we came back to the hotel bar and the band turned up, they were staying here last night, they’re fellow scousers and we ended up drinking together and chatting until about 1am“..
So there you have it, I missed the first and most important day of the meeting, paid an extra 3500 RMB for my flight and missed out on the chance to see and meet some of my childhood heroes (which would have been golden blogging material too), I’d hit rock bottom, the trip officially couldn’t get any worse from this point on..
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