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My Good Friend Anthony

Until recently, I was very fond of British Airways. They have awesome full-flat beds in business class, as well as nice lounges where you can wine and dine yourself to your heart’s content. Sure, their staff could be friendlier – I once had an airline attendant “quiz” me on the location of the nearest security exit after the “security presentation”. I should have asked her if she would like me to blow in the vest as well 😉 But overall, it was good value.

Until recently. The last time I was flying, British Airways lost my luggage. Needless to say the love-hate slider between myself and BA made a little more progress towards the hate end that day. Brilliantly, I had also put my cell phone in the suitcase, which was also lost now. The first thing I did out of SFO was to buy a new temporary cell phone. I gave BA the number so they could keep me up to date on the “property irregularity report”.

The next day in the middle of an important meeting, my temp phone rang. I excused myself, saying I just had to take this call – really didn’t want to miss it if it was the airline. So the voice at the other end spoke:

“Anthony?”

“Um…excuse me, who?”

“Is Anthony there?”

I wished so badly for them to be calling from BA. I “figured” maybe she has the wrong name or something:

“Where are you calling from?”

“??? San Francisco!”

Turns out it was the wrong number, plain and simple.

Sadly, I did not get a call from BA for the remainder of that day (even though I had been promised one). However, I did get a call from Anthony himself 🙂

“Hey dude…have you been getting calls for Anthony?”

“Yes.”

“That’s me.”

“OK…”

“Look dude, I change phone numbers a lot, and I move around a lot. If somebody calls me, tell them you don’t know me, you don’t know who I am, you don’t know where I am, and you don’t know my new phone number. Just tell them you don’t know anything about me and hang up.”

WOW! Now this was entertaining 😀

“Man, how would I know who you are or where you are anyways?”

“OK thanks dude, I gotta run!”

As Anthony had predicted, a lot of people did try to get in touch with him. There were lots of calls that started like this:

“This is not a sales soliciation. This call contains important information about your account…”

There were also some strange text messages:

“Im home gogo ?!gangsta go da rnb thug!”

(Don’t ask me what that means – although I imagine Anthony might know)

Overall, during the course of the next weeks, I held on to the phone just to see what else I might find out about Anthony. I found out his last name through a friend who called, as well as the numbers of some of his friends. But Anthony himself remained elusive, even though I kept getting lots of his traffic 🙂

And BA? They were in the process of actively losing my luggage when I made a trip to SFO two days later. My bag was sitting right there at the terminal and for some reason, they had not scanned it upon arrival. The unhelpful staff were now apologetic. I guess that’s it for flying BA and their business beds 😉

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Braga and the Kitchen Fetish

I’m quite a Star Trek fan, and this post is about an interesting pattern I have seen emerge in Star Trek shows (and a spin-off by one of the producers, Brannon Braga).

Next Generation was discontinued at the peak of its popularity (for reasons unknown to me). For a while the only Trek on the airwaves was Deep Space Nine, which took place on a space station, and often criticized for the lack of exploration. Voyager returned to the exploration theme – and also was the debut of what I call “the kitchen fetish“.

A regular character on Voyager, considered by most to be highly annoying, was Neelix. Neelix was a strange little creature but he did spend a lot of time in the kitchen. A lot of boiling pots, bubbling mixtures, pans with burning oil, near-miss fires, and delicacies which turned out to be not so well-aligned with the taste buds of the unexpecting explorers from the Alpha Quadrant were a staple of the show. Often times, Neelix‘s taste in food was horrible for the crew of Voyager – except when he was temporarily merged with Tuvok, the resident Vulcan, and seasoned his recipes with Vulcan logic for one short episode. Sadly, the need to conserve power made replicator usage a luxury on Voyager, and the crew had to deal with the Talaxian, and the viewers got to see lots of the kitchen.

Enterprise, the ill-fated show, perhaps to avoid criticisms like those against Neelix, had a completely off-screen chef. The chef was never visible in any episode (but viewers still complained that Phlox, the doctor, was too much like Neelix and equally annoying). Enter the series finale of Enterprise. Nearly the entire episode took place in the till-then inaccessible kitchen of Enterprise. The chef was actually substituted in by Riker from the Next Generation, chatting with the Enterprise crew thanks to the blessings of holodeck technology. Riker was listening to what the crew had to say about Archer and everything else that’s going on, whilst giving them instructions on how to knead pizza dough (and getting a bit curt with his instructions every now and then). It was the return of the kitchen – and with a vengeance.

After Enterprise was over, Braga started a new show, Threshold. I very much enjoyed Threshold, just like the Star Trek series. Threshold even featured Brent Spiner, more commonly known as “Data“. Threshold dealt with a very interesting alien invasion scenario – where the aliens don’t actually send any particular member of their species to Earth, but instead a probe that manipulates all DNA on the planet, and starts converting everyone into their own species. In the very first episode of this new, and also ill-fated show that saw only one half season, the probe makes its first contact with humans on board a ship out in the Pacific Ocean. The very first scene of this very first episode takes place in…well, you guessed it, the kitchen! Pots and pans ablaze, broth bubbling, once again we start off with an extensive kitchen panorama.

Don’t get me wrong – I love kitchens. A kitchen has always felt to me like the coziest place in any home, and is full of savory anticipation of taste bud nirvana. I just find it very interesting that the kitchen theme has emerged so frequently in shows produced by Braga.

There is also another recurring Braga theme…which I will talk about in my next post, so stay tuned!