"British Airways Cancels All Flights at London Heathrow"
"Öllu flugi British Airways á Heathrow aflýst - 20.000 manns strandaglópar"

What a day.

Woke up all happy, as I was supposed to be going to Beirut, taking off at 14:35.
Went to the office, checked-in, briefing, lovely crew.
Got on the aircraft, did all our stuff, poured the Business-Class drinks and folded the newspapers.
Passengers boarded, everyone happy and smiley.
14:35
The captain made an announcement:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, a very warm welcome onboard this British Airways Airbus A321 operated by BMED. I do hope you've made yourself comfortable onboard, as it looks like you'll have to be sitting comfortably for quite a while, as due to today's strike by those at Gate Gourmet (the catering company), the ground staff have decided to pose a sympathy strike, meaning all bus, towtruck-drivers, and baggage loaders are now not working, effectively putting the whole of Heathrow Airport to a standstill..."

Then he went on explaining how wed have to sit on the ground until any news had reached us... and sit we did, for approximately 7 hours.
Since we were on what's called a remote stand we couldn't bus the passengers back to the terminal, as the bus drivers weren't working.
So eventually we did the whole service on the ground, drinks, meals and all.

Then finally, 7 hours after scheduled departure, a decision was made to get the passengers out of the plane and back into the terminal, as some busdrivers were now volunteering to work.
Our captain then got a ladder to get to the cargo-hold and retrieved our luggage (as passengers' luggage wasn't being offloaded, seeing as baggageloaders had striked aswell).
After all this, we then went back to the office and then home.
Every single crew-member is on standby tomorrow... seeing as nobody knows yet what the outcome of the abovementioned industrial action will be.

What I find extremely frustrating (apart from the obvious, not getting to Beirut) is how utterly stupid the Gate Gourmet staff are. To be honest, I have no sympathy for them whatsoever.
The fact is that Gate Gourmet isn't doing very well at the moment, and has been struggling for a while now. They decided to make quite a lot of people redundant (around 640 to be precise) recently, offering them generous packages, and further training opportunities to help them find other jobs.
But no.
Those people decided it wasn't good enough, instead they told Gate Gourmet they would strike (without Union approval, which is rather important in a case such as this one)... to which Gate Gourmet replied it would have to literally fire those 640, leaving them with nothing if they decided to do that.

So the obvious happened.
Those halfwits made the wrong decision, causing utter chaos for the whole British Airways operation, and subsequent multi-million pound losses.
Short-sighted &#%?$ is all I can say.

And as for those groundstaff (this does not include check-in and terminal staff, rather the oldies that drive the buses and push the aircraft back from stand aswell as the baggageloaders), they're a bunch of lazy twats that saw this as an opportunity to sit down on their big, white, fat behinds and have more cups of tea and watch telly.

Right. Some might think I'm pulling a stong reaction to this... but think a bit further ahead.
Because of today, British Airways and BMED have lost millions of pounds, and probably quite a few passengers, with flights not getting back to normal till probably next week if we're lucky. And this being the summer, with nearly every flight full, it's not easy clearing a big back-log like that.

To put it bluntly: at the end of it, it could be my job on the line.

Now, thanks for reading my venting-out statement for August 11th, one of the weirdest working days of my life.

Keep on flying with the World's Favourite Airline.