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At exactly this instant – 11:11 on 11:.11 – officially Karneval kicks off  and doesn’t finish until 17 February next year.

Lord preserve us.

And while we’re on the subject of terminal silliness, here’s a story from the murky past:

When I used to work in airline operations (long before I did the “Executive Management” thing), we used to deal with the media logistics outfits.

They’d screech to a halt outside the terminal, disgorge bundles of newspapers and magazines so hot off the press that the ink was still wet and be off to the next drop-off point.

We’d make sure that they were on the flights to where-ever that left within the hour.

And we’d get free samples for our troubles.

Which was the source of great envy to the plebs who didn’t get free samples and who’d sidle up to you – all friendly and greasy, two-faced as anything – and say “You always get free magazines – can I have one, too?”

“Hörzu” (“Listen up”), a TV magazine, was in greatest demand and these scrounger fell on our nerves royally.

So we hatched a plot. (If I recall, idle hands and alcohol were involved)

We kept back a great pile of them for a year and when the sidlers turned up on their usual bottom-feeding act, we handed them out with great generosity.

So there they were a week later, sitting at home on the sofa with wifey, trying to work out why there’s a political discussion on instead of the blockbuster they were looking  forward to.

We kept a fairly low profile for a while after that…..

11 Nov This entry was published on 11 November, 2009 at 10:11. It’s filed under Mainz and tagged Karneval, True stories. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.