A Travel Story: Taxis are critical infrastructure.

I’m spending the day in Melbourne today, and of course I have a travel trip. I had an early morning flight this morning which departed at about 6:10am from Canberra airport.

Last night I made a booking with the local taxi company to pick me up at home at 5:00am – plenty of time to get to the airport in Canberra at that time of day. My alarm went off at 4:30am (anything before 5:00am always seems like such an unseemly hour) and was standing out the front by 4:59am – no problems, just a few minutes before the taxi gets here, or so I thought . . .

After standing in the cold for about five minutes I decided to give the taxi company a quick call to confirm that there were no problems – especially given that in the past the taxi had always been there on or before the scheduled time.

Apparently not long after I called last night the taxi reservations system crashed – badly and all Canberra bookings were lost. Because the booking was lost they had no way of calling me to let me know so if I wasn’t such a nervous traveller these days (I’ve missed my fair share of flights) I could have been standing out there for much longer.

I asked them to get a taxi out to me urgently although they couldn’t really provide an ETA. I stood out in the cold for another fifteen minutes before I decided to give them a call to see if anyone had bidded for the pick-up. After about five minutes on hold they couldn’t tell me because their radio network and bidding system was also playing up.

It would be fair to say that I was a little disappointed, so I decided to cancel the call and go inside and wake my wife up – I was already running the risk of not making the flight if Virgin Blue decided not to let be check-in late.

As Nicola and Bella were waking up  the taxi arrived and I decided to take that option rather than take them out into the cold Canberra morning (I knew it was cold because there was snow on the hills).

The flight down to Melbourne was very sparsely populated – even for a mid-week flight. I suspect that many of the travellers would have been inconvienced today and as a result would have missed their flights. I know from experience that those cheaper Virgin Blue flights are nearly completely booked out each day.

This little experience just reminded me how important certain functions are in society, and the sub-systems that support them are equally as critical. The difficulty arises when organisations don’t understand how critical their systems are and don’t configure them accordingly – or sadly the margins on their business model are so thin that they can’t afford to put in the faul tollerant infrastructure – I suspect that might have been what happened here, but since I am in no way associated with the taxi industry I just don’t know.

Happy trails to you!

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Late last night I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. I started reading the book on Saturday after Nicola went down in the morning and queued to get it – thanks sweetie.

I’ve hardly been able to put the book down in my spare moments which is quite a compliment for J.K. Rowling since as a general rule I don’t read too much fiction prefering instead the sharp plot lines of technical books and blogs.

Since I am sure most people haven’t read the book yet I won’t go and reveal the major plot points but I did want to talk to the general theme.

Some critics have said that the book is really a filler and wasn’t edited heavily enough, I guess this is an understandable criticism since the book clocks in at over 550 pages. My opinion however is that the book is really about establishing context for future volumes and while you could trim a few bits out – overall its does a really good job of setting the backdrop for future adventures of Harry Potter and his friends.

The history of Lord Voldemort is definately a major theme and at certain points I genuinely felt sorry for the character and was almost angry at J.K. Rowling for making the character I loved to hate more likable – or at least, understandable.

Overall I give the book an eight out of ten for continued excellence in characfter development and extreme readability. To get a ten out of ten the book would have needed to spend more time focusing on Draco Malfoy’s activities – sometimes you just want to know what that boy is up to . . .