The Day I Won A Free Trip On Concorde... The Day Before I Took A Free Trip On Concorde
We never win anything.
That's always been the mantra in my family, and while mostly true it does ignore two things: we're in possession of most of the forms of privilege available to human beings and thus are already winning; and we don't actually buy the lottery tickets or enter the competitions that are, after all, a precondition to winning.
But I did once win something.
A free trip on Concorde... the day before I was due to take a free trip on Concorde. I think maybe the Gods were having a laugh.
So firstly, what's the deal with the free trip on Concorde, the first one that is, not the second one I won? Well the company I worked for at the time was doing quite well. This was the year 2000, and we all thought we were going to become dot-com millionaires. (Spoiler alert - we didn't).
But our two very generous bosses decided to take the whole company (well them, their wives, and their four employees) to New York for a weekend, flying out by Concorde and coming back first class on a 777.
It wasn't quite that simple though, because at the time, British Airways prices were such that it was cheaper for Belgians to fly on Concorde than it was for British people. Or to clarify, if you bought a ticket from Brussels to New York via London Heathrow, with the first leg being on a regular plane and the second leg being on Concorde, it cost you a lot less than if you just flew Concorde from London to New York.
(I believe this was later ruled illegal by the EU's European Court of Justice, because you're aren't supposed to discriminate between citizens of different EU countries).
So this was my slightly mad travel itinerary:
Thursday, my day was:
1) Regular commuter train from my flat in Feltham to the office in Central London (and then work a bit).
2) Tube and then train that afternoon (with colleagues) from the office to London Luton airport.
3) Easyjet flight (with colleagues) from Luton to Brussels.
4) British Airways business class flight (with colleagues) from Brussels to Heathrow (after spending a couple of hours hanging around the airport).
5) Bus from Heathrow to home.
And then Friday, my itinerary would be:
6) Regular commuter train from my flat to the office (and then work a bit).
7) That afternoon, tube and then Heathrow Express (with colleagues) from the office to Heathrow.
8) Afternoon / Evening Concorde flight from Heathrow to JFK, New York (taking off in the UK early-evening and landing in the US late-afternoon).
And of course, the reason for this whole palaver was that as far as British Airways were concerned, we were flying from Brussels to New York with a one-night stopover at Heathrow.
So anyway, I eventually get home on Thursday, half way through all of this, after a mad day which involved two train journeys, one tube journey, two flights, three airports, a bus, and a morning actually working — only to find waiting for me on my doormat a marketing type communication from British Airways.
Around then the airline industry was going through one of its periodic slumps, so to try and get demand going, British Airways were doing a big giveaway. You didn't need to enter; they were just going to pick two million people off a marketing database somewhere, and give them each a prize.
Now if you've ever participated in one of Walkers Crisps' free giveaways where packets of crisps contain prize tokens, you'll know how this works:
There'll be a huge number of prizes, and they'll make a big deal of how many prizes there are.
There'll be a very small number of top prizes, but these will be the prizes they tell you about.
The vast majority of the prizes will be trivial, and they won't mention these prizes at all.
So for the crisps it would be: "Ten million prizes!" and "You could win £10,000!"... but actually, you were (almost) inevitably going to end up winning a mere free packet of crisps.
So it was with this British Airways giveaway. The two million randomly allocated prizes basically consisted of:
100 pairs of tickets for a Concorde flight to New York, with business class return.
100 pairs of tickets for a round-the-world flight.
1,999,800 offers where you could get something like £30 off a flight to Milan (with you paying the difference). Wow. Big whoop.
Anyhow, I opened the envelope and found something that appeared to say that I'd won two pairs of tickets to fly to New York on Concorde. Now obviously, I knew that I hadn't actually won: I'd seen that Simpsons episode.
So I phoned up my friend Warren, whose family had a background in aviation and who was pretty knowledgable about these things. The conversation, after I explained what I'd received, went something like this:
Me: I know it's like one of those Readers Digest type things, and I haven't actually won.
Him: You've won.
Me: I get that I haven't actually won, and I'm just through to the next round, but what are my chances of actually winning?
Him: You've won.
Me: Me, no I get that, I get that I haven't won. But I'm closer to winning now, right? How many more stages do I have to get through to get these flights?
Him: You've won, you bastard. There are only a hundred of those prizes and you've won one of them.
Me: I've actually won?
Him: Yes. You've won.
Me: It's not like Homer, and the fake cheque?
Him: No. You've won a free flight on Concorde.
Me: But I'm already flying on Concorde tomorrow?
And that was kind of the problem. This was a prize for two that had to be used within three months, and I didn't have anyone to go with and little prospect of finding them within three months. And although the flights were free, I'd need to book a hotel and that wouldn't be free, and I need to take time off.
But beyond all that, within another 24 hours, I'd already have gone on Concorde.
Did I really need to go on it twice?
In the end, I offered it to a couple of friends of mine, and they used it for a week's break in New York over St Patrick's Day.
So anyhow, the day after winning the prize, I flew Concorde to New York. I wish I could remember more of it, but I was going through a pretty bad time in my life back then (with not having anyone to go on holiday with being part of that), and to be honest, it's all a bit of a blur.
I remember going up to the cockpit (this was pre-9/11) and being momentarily freaked out by all the bakelite and dials and the resultant realisation that we were travelling twice the speed of sound in a craft whose technology was older than me. (From the outside, Concorde looked like the future, but in the cockpit, trust me, it very much looked like the past).
I remember the Concorde-only lounge, with our plane parked literally right outside (no walking to the gate for us), and the fact that when I tried to check out my webzine Critical Miss on the free Internet terminals, it was blocked for reasons of games, profanity — which was fair enough, really.
And I remember the very bouncy approach into JFK, although I think I suffered a bit less than my boss's wife who, having partaken of the copious amounts of free booze on offer, was now feeling a tad less well-equipped to cope with such a landing.
And that was it. The biggest, most pointless thing I've ever won in my life. It was one of those moments where you begin to see why ancient peoples' believed in vengeful, capricious gods with a mildly sadistic sense of humour.
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