The View in Rio

May 4, 1994

I'm sitting here in my hotel room, looking out over Ipanema Beach in the Copacabana section of Rio de Janeiro. The sun has just gone down, and there are shadows over the beach. The water is still a luminescent blue-green, but it's slowly darkening to an inky purple. About a mile down the beach, up in the hills behind the main highway, there's a huge fire raging. I don't know whether it's part of the forest burning up, or just a bunch of houses on fire, but it has formed a huge, angry orange splotch on the dark silhouette of the mountain rising into the sky ... all in all, a pretty amazing spectacle.

This place is like Miami with mountains. The hills are a lush green, and I could see glistening lakes back in the jungles as I flew up the coast from Sao Paulo this morning. On a lot of my previous trips, things have seemed kind of gray and drab -- but everything was awash in color today. Rio itself was a little hazy when I arrived, and the layer of pollution is very visible, almost like in Los Angeles. But the temperature was 88 degrees, and I had a feeling that I had just flown into the beginning of summer -- even though it's really the beginning of autumn here. All the men were in shorts and sandals, and the women were in halter tops and bikinis -- and this was in the airport! The taxi driver had the windows rolled down and a wonderful breeze blew through as we zipped along the edge of the water toward the hotel; believe it or not, they were playing a Beach Boys song from the 60s on the radio. The strangest sight of all: a naked man standing by the side of the highway, bathing himself with a bucket of water, covered from head to toe with soap-suds, scrubbing away while whistling a tune.

I managed to get 7 hours of sleep on the flight down here from New York last night, so I felt reasonably civilized, though still somewhat stiff, when I got here. The ability to sleep was due to a first-class upgrade, which I acquired in return for 40,000 frequent flyer miles -- and which provided an amusing example of why computer consultants like me still find lots of work to do. I arranged the upgrade over the phone with American Airlines, but didn't have enough time for them to mail the appropriate coupons and certificates to me. No problem, said the disembodied voice on the phone; for a modest processing fee, we'll let you pick it up at the airport when you check in. When I showed up at the airport, the ticket agent verified that I did indeed have an upgrade, but could not figure out how to type the proper transaction on her computer terminal to print a first-class ticket. She called over three of her friends, and they all stood around muttering at the terminal for several minutes.

Finally, one of them reached into her purse and pulled out a thick Filofax stuffed with little scraps of paper; she plucked out one such scrap, which was covered with cryptic computer commands, and said, "Aha! This is it!" The others had never seen the paper, so they all huddled over it as if it were a message from the gods, muttering and poking at various letters and hieroglypics, trying to decide what they should type.

"Try this," one of them said.

"No!" shouted another. "Don't do that! Last time I tried that, my computer-screen went dead, and I couldn't use it for the rest of the day." Two of the agents went off on a tangent discussing this, the dreaded computer-screen-down-for-the-day disease.

"Can't you just press a HELP key on your keyboard?" I asked. "Didn't the computer people give you some on-line help facilities?"

The head agent looked up at me blankly. "Oh, no," she said, "they never do that. We have to go to a class to learn how to do this stuff -- this kind of upgrade is brand-new, and we just went to class last week to learn it. But none of us can remember exactly what it is." The others, I should point out, had not even been industrious enough to write down the cryptic commands. They finally told me to go off to the Admiral's Club to relax while they continued fussing over the details; it took them another 20 minutes before they finally arrived with the ticket.

It's interesting to see all of these complex, sophisticated computer systems surrounded by an equally complex layer of instructions scribbled on scraps of paper stuffed into notebooks and purses. If the senior ticket agent quits or gets run over by a bus, it will probably be completely impossible for me to accomplish such an upgrade ever again ...