Relocation

Relocation is a just a 10 letter word. But the process is not that simple. There are various things that one needs to plan and execute. House hunt is one – for example. Infact one of the key factors.

Vikram and I began our house hunt journey on the 20^th of November 2010  (Saturday) at 5.30 in the morning! We had an early morning (7.20 am) flight. And we managed to miss it :P:P . We reached exactly thirty minutes before departure- which going by Kingfisher standards is EXACTLY 10 minutes late because the check in counter closes EXACTLY forty minutes before departure!!  This was clearly stated in the ticket print outs that we got but the fact remains that neither of us bothered to read it – how inexact could we have gotten there now???

Anyways, even after several sessions of begging, trying and talking they refused to let us through. So then we had no choice but to look for another flight. But luckily, or so we thought then, due to bad weather and low visibility the flight , which was due to depart at 7.20 , couldn’t take off.

Vikram received a message saying that the departure had been postponed to 9.20 am!! We were very excited and ran to the counter again – but they said that they still couldn’t let us in. So within 60 seconds of excitement  we were  upset again because we didn’t quite figure out the reason why they couldn’t let us through when we had the time, the flight was around and this time for a change we were also present well within time. We insisted on speaking with the manager and finally when we managed to speak to the Manager we couldn’t argue further when he explained that once the check in is done – there are a lot of procedures that follow to make sure that the aircraft is balanced with the given number passengers on board. All this calls for a hell lot of formalities and plenty of documentation. So any increment in the number of passengers would mean going through the entire ordeal again and that would mean pushing the landing time. 

The only way they said they could let us through was if and only if, I saw the two lettered word being spoken in CAPITALS there,  two people from the flight decided to cancel and get off the plane: P.

Now keeping ourselves in an onboard passenger’s shoe (rather two of them while keeping in mind that the summation of their weight is equivalent to  our weights put together), which we would have loved to even if that meant wearing the wrong shoe size, we couldn’t see ourselves canceling the flight and getting off the plane.

We were left with no choice but to keep shut!

But someone up there, much above the aircraft was very  kind - for the manager offered to reschedule our tickets for the 4.45 p.m. flight to Pune that very day without any extra charge!! We were relieved that at least we would make it to Pune the same day just some ..er.. may be some more than ‘just some’ hours later.

We got the rescheduled tickets done but that’s when  wisdom dawned upon us and we realized that we had some eight hours to kill at the airport because there was absolutely no point going back to the city given the distance and the cost involved .

I could imagine how Mr. Steven Spielberg  got the idea of making the movie ‘The Terminal’ . In case you are wondering- well it is the same flick where Mr. Tom Hanks gets stranded at a very fancy airport with access to all the modern amenities that one can imagine of and along with  Ms Suave, Catherine Zeta Jones, to romance with at sporadic intervals.

But don’t get any ideas because our 8 hour long wait was not even close to  the celluloid  experience that Mr. Tom Hanks had because all the book stores, shopping areas and drinking areas were beyond the security check point. So we decided to make do with whatever was available on our side of the airport and began our own eating and shopped spree. Got two books for ourselves and somehow managed to stay awake till 4.00 in those extremely uncomfortable chairs: P

During that long wait, approximately, about every two hours we did have to fight the strong urge within us to request the airport authorities to get us past  the security check in advance so that we could make better use of  time. But the thought of having driven away from the airport on account of  being strong suspects for terror , given that we had created enough uproar in the morning to get everyone’s attention to get on the plane, we kept quiet.

Finally we reached Pune at 7.00 in the evening!! Need I mention that It was quite an experience. 

Lastly, coming to the point which I had started to write about – The house hunt. While we were waiting at the airport I had managed to call up all the prospective house owners and rescheduled our appointments for late Saturday evening and the whole of Sunday.

But despite, some very good leads, or so we had thought then again, we hadn’t seen even one good house until 6.30 on Sunday evening.

Vikram, my dearest, believes that one should always have a plan. In case the first one fails there should be a backup plan. Now since things were not going the way we had planned right from the airport- he was ready with what we wanted the most – the backup plan!!!

So the backup plan was that I would stay back for a day and hunt for the house while Vikram would report to work cause he couldn’t take any leaves in his notice period.  As the day was coming to an end and we were nearing darkness with increasing reliance on our backup plan with every tick of the seconds hand in the watch-  the broker showed us one house which all of us liked!

But as luck would have it – it was quite dark when we visited the place and being a new construction they still hadn’t fixed the electrical appliances! So we had to check out the place with whatever light our mobile phones could generate  JJ 

We finalized the house in the hope that it would turn out the way it had seemed in the dark :P 

Our return flight on Monday was scheduled to depart at 7.20 in the morning again. So having been through all of this we didn’t really want to take any chances so we decided to book the cab 2 hours and 20 minutes in advance to cover a distance of about 10 k.m. that normally gets covered in 20 minutes given the traffic in Pune.

But given the luck we had with flights guess one last time!!  Well Vikram got a message at 12.30 in the night saying that the flight had been delayed to 10.20!! Thanks to my dear hubby’s insomniac attributes, he was awake until then to read the message and reschedule the cab. I got to know about it only when I got up at 4.30 a.m. and woke up Vikram reminding him of the early morning flight.   But this time around we were indeed very happy to have our sleep back!!