John Walker's Electronic House

Thursday

I knew that the lovely Will Porter would be on the trip. Even though he’s from the evil enemy bad people at PC Zone, he’s been there a short enough time to not be completely horrid. It’s good to know there’s someone you know on such trips, because otherwise you can spend many days in the company of boring people who want to do nothing but sit in dark bars all day long. This has happened too often. Will and I agreed to do no such thing in the ludicrous amount of spare time we would have.

The plane journey out was supposed to be just under eleven hours. Which is far long to be anywhere, let-alone crammed into the economy seat of an aeroplane located inconvenient distances from interesting afternoon strolls. But to make it extra-special, we were allowed to get used to our seats for a bonus hour and a half as the plane sat around on the ground in the UK. At first we were sitting still because someone who had booked in had decided to not get onto the plane, so they had to root out his luggage in case it was all filled up with bombs. How does that happen? Someone checks in, puts their luggage on the plane, and then… what? Goes home? Becomes engrossed in a magazine in the airport Smiths? Suddenly is overwhelmed by a desire to live like Tom Hanks in that there film, and is too busy working on his astonishingly poor accent to care?

But then they discovered an “electrical fault”, and we had to go back and be fixed. I like to think this is very much like Jimbo the Jetset, and the plane informs the pilot of his/her problem by a large mouth beneath the cockpit. But I wish they wouldn’t pass the same information on to us. I don’t want to be told that there’s an electrical fault. I’m about to spend eleven hours 39,000 feet above my squishy-squashy death in this thing, and I really have no desire to hear about the frequency with which things go wrong. But more especially, I absolutely in no way wish to hear these words forty-five minutes later emit from the on-board tannoy: “Well ladies and gentlemen, the engineers came and had a look at the problem, but they couldn’t find anything wrong. It seems to have fixed itself. So we’ll be on our way shortly.” WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT?! Don’t tell me that! You have an electrical problem that prevents our taking off, and you tell us that it can just come and go as it pleases? ARGH! Tell me, “Well ladies and gentlemen, our engineer looked at the problem, fixed it, and then right there on the spot invented a device that prevents anything from ever going wrong on a plane ever! What luck!” Lie to me about this! What are we going to do? Sue him when it turns out to be a lie and we’re all dead and on fire?

The flight was long and annoying and my bum hurt and the movies were crap. Fortunately I sat next to Dan from Playstation.com, whatever that is, and he was a lovely man too. The flight looked like this:

Going in that direction, it adds eight hours to your day. Which means that it’s mid-afternoon in San Francisco, and long past bedtime in your head. So after settling into our (bonkers) hotel, we were taken out to a Chinese restaurant. Our (bonkers) hotel was literally the other side of the road from China Town, so this seemed ideal. But one of the PRs, Tim, had us walk for over five hundred trillion miles, throughout which we grumbled and moaned and looked longingly through the windows of beautiful looking Chinese restaurants with plentiful seating and pretty walls. But no, Tim marched us straight past them, ignoring our pleas. Eventually we stopped outside a really grotty looking place. It looked like a cross between a laundrette and a cheap diner. And it was ridiculously full with people queuing outside. But still, Tim ignored our begging. We eventually fought our way in. Instead of ordering, Tim asked the waitress to “bring us food”.

And oh my goodness. I can say without fear of hyperbole, that I had the very nicest food I’ve ever eaten in my life. Incredible, utterly incredible, flavours. And sat the other side of the restaurant: Francis Ford Coppola. So yeah, Tim was right. The show off.

The hardy went on to some bars. The sensible went back to the hotel. Which was bonkers.