Thought I'd relate a fun if a bit bizarre experience a week or so ago at OMGoclock in the freezing MEL cold morning (just adding for poetic license and that I had not yet had enough coffee
). Anyway I was flying north. I had OLCI the day prior as per usual. No issue. As is my want, and with this thread in mind, I went to print BP's at soon to die kiosk (I want to show them love
). Well, as also has been my habit I used my physical card barcode to scan on the kiosk (I've done same thing for years).. That worked fine until the kiosk threw up an error and to see the agent. huh? Tried at another venerable old gal kiosk.. same thing.
I then noticed bunches of pax milling around and agents stabbing at terminals and there appeared to be some sort of general check in problem going on. I thought no worries I'll go to the lounge anyway.
On the way up there I noticed my mobile BP's had disappeared from my App with a error message on there too about checking in with an agent. What the..?
Flights were operating (that I knew of) and seemed very weird.
So rocked up at the lounge, agent took my FF card, brought everything up.. and looked puzzled... colleague came along.. more puzzlement... they then declared the error was due to a short connection in SYD (it was 35min, which is MCT, and I knew it was short, but QF sold it to me, and there's a whole other story there). Anyway they said they'd sort it for me and to go get a coffee. All good.
The thing that I find strange is that OLCI worked perfectly the day before and no timings had changed so why all of a sudden a problem I wondered?
Anyway a few minutes later I got my boarding passes and a comment that the system got "confused" by my expired physical card (well yeah, they'd not issued a new one since 2019) and I should use the app barcode in future.
that's a new one. I mean sure the plastic had "expired" as the printed expiry date was Aug 2020, but my status had been extended obviously and note the same card/narcode had worked a few months earlier - I figured all the barcode was really linking to was to my QFF# more or less, and the system would check my current status anyway regardless of the card.
Anyway I don't know if the explanation is that reliable or not, but it seemed odd on top of the short connection thing.
It was a bit of a strange morning all up.
I made my connection just fine though so zero issues in the end.
I'll miss the old kiosks